SendOwl Blog

The Complete Guide to Building Simple & Effective Sales Funnels

2022-07-19T17:06:31Z

A high-converting sales funnel is an invaluable marketing asset that empowers creators and entrepreneurs to automate lead generation — from awareness all the way through to conversion.

Funnels focus on relationship building, as opposed to making a quick sale. They work to attract interest and collect information, allowing creators to build stronger connections and prove an offering's benefit. This is accomplished with free, valuable knowledge, empathizing with pain points, product test-runs, and more — ideally ushering leads toward making a purchase and becoming loyal customers.

Businesses that nurture leads pay less (33%) to acquire customers while increasing sales (50%). This is significant when you consider that marketers use nearly half of their budget on lead generation. Small businesses and creators can take advantage of these opportunities too.

In this article, we’ll teach you everything you need to create your own sales funnel, including:

What is a Sales Funnel?
Sales Funnel Examples: How Do They Work?
The 5 Stages of Sales Funnels
How to Create a Sales Funnel for Your Business (in 3 Steps)

We’ll also cover funnel examples, what content to create for every stage, and how to support and persuade potential customers throughout the process.

While sales funnels can be intimidating, they’re simple to set up. With an understanding of how they work and how to use them in your business, you’ll be automating lead generation in no time. Let’s get started!

What Is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is the content and marketing structure that entrepreneurs use to attract, capture, nurture, and convert leads from discovery through customer retention.

While it may sound complicated, funnels aren’t difficult. Think of it this way:

Have you ever taken a subway, train, or plane that required multiple connections to get where you were going? This method of travel is a good analogy for the journey that leads will take through your sales funnel:

There are a lot of different avenues from which leads might find your business.
Potential customers have their own agendas: a destination they’re trying to get to. They’ll only get on your train if they think it’s going where they want to go.
Everyone is there for a reason: your funnel should bring them closer to what they want.

For these reasons, sales funnels tend to become more complicated as they expand to address various customer pain points, inform customers at varying levels of awareness, and capture leads across marketing channels.

Therefore, it’s important to begin with one or two marketing channels. Build a funnel, refine your offer, and measure the conversion rate.

That being said, it’s highly likely that you have already created a sales funnel without realizing it. Here’s an example:

Consider a website that attracts 5,000 visitors a month. Of those 5,000 people, about 100 convert into newsletter subscribers. Around 25% of people who are on the email list purchase products within the first year of subscribing. A significant portion of those people become repeat customers and loyal fans. In this example, the sales funnel is:

SEO blog posts > Newsletter > Conversion (purchase)

However, to achieve the conversions, the sales funnel had to create awareness, build interest or promote evaluation, encourage consideration, and motivate action. We’ll discuss these foundational stages later.

Sales Funnel Examples: How Do They Work?

In general, a sales funnel contains three or four major components; for example:

Instagram ad > Landing page > Conversion
Blog post > Email list > Conversion
Youtube video > Landing page > Lead magnet > Conversion
Influencer social post > Blog post > Conversion

Sales funnels are highly effective at generating leads, building relationships, and producing sales conversions. But they cannot anticipate human behavior.

For this reason, it is impossible to predict every path someone might take from discovering your brand to purchasing a product.

In the example below, two potential customers make the same purchase but take different paths to get there:

Customer A discovers your social media and becomes a follower. After a few months, they read a post that inspires them to click the link in your bio. They read a blog post but don’t sign up for the newsletter. They continue to follow you, engaging with the content occasionally. Another blog post is shared. They read it and buy the product you promote within the post.

Customer B becomes aware of your brand through a paid Google search advertisement. They read the article but do not sign up for the newsletter. The next day, they see a retargeted ad and visit your website. They join the newsletter and receive an email sequence. When the sequence concludes, they buy the product you promoted in the concluding email.

Therefore, it’s necessary to (eventually) create top-of-the-funnel opportunities across your marketing channels. This will allow you to meet potential customers where they are and address differing pain points within your audience.

The 5 Stages of Sales Funnels

Each stage of a sales funnel should move prospective customers closer to making a purchase. To this end, it is necessary to create content that is tailored to each stage and builds on prior information.

Step zero of building a sales funnel is knowing your audience.

This is essential to creating an effective funnel. To generate leads, you must first understand who you are trying to attract:

What pain points does your content solve? Beyond the demographics and crafted persona, who does your company seek to serve?
Furthermore, what are your company’s values? What is your company’s mission beyond financial gain?

Knowing your ‘why’ will allow you to position your brand to attract those whose values, perspectives, and struggles are an ideal fit for your company’s products.

Stage 1: How Will You Attract & Engage Customers?

Awareness (Top of the Funnel)

The top of your funnel casts a wide net of potential new customers and generates awareness of your brand or company. At this stage, you’re not trying to sell a product or offering. You’re producing valuable, free content to attract the attention of your ideal customers.

Therefore, the top of your funnel starts wherever your audience is already spending time.

Draw attention through content, advertising, and events; examples include:

Blog posts
Podcasts
Social media posts
YouTube videos
In-person events
Sponsored ads

The main purpose of this stage is to inform, inspire, and delight potential customers.

However, a key aspect is knowing what action the visitor needs to take to move to the next part of the funnel. Are you building an email list? Is your goal to send people to a landing page or have them register for a webinar?

Determine the next step that will bring them closer to what they want. And consider how you will persuade them to proceed through the funnel.

Stage 2: What Will You Offer to Build Trust & Interest?

Interest & Evaluation (Middle of the Funnel)

Now that you have their attention, stage two is about building relationships and providing more specific information. At this point, the lead is not looking to buy anything. But they’re curious about the brand and evaluating its values, consistency, and content.

This stage is crucial for connecting with potential customers and making them part of your audience. Examples of content for the interest and evaluation stage include:

Webinars
Lead magnets
Ebooks
Blog posts
Social media posts
Ad retargeting
Mini-courses
Chatbots
Email newsletter

During this stage, focus on providing high quality information that positions you as an expert or leader in your industry. It’s also important to track what visitors are engaging with and how often leads become audience members.

Determine your goals for this stage and measure the conversion rate (people who visit and complete a task divided by those who just visit) — for example:

Jacob has a website on indoor plants and how to take care of them. At the end of a popular blog post on monsteras, he promotes a free ebook: So You Bought a Monstera? Keeping It Alive & Other Hot Tips. To receive the ebook, visitors must enter their email address.

Jacob’s blog post receives an average of 10,000 visitors every month. Of those 10,000 visitors, roughly 300 sign up to receive the ebook. This informs Jacob that his opt-in offer (also known as a lead magnet) converts well: 300 / 10,000 = 0.03 — 3% conversion rate.

Stage two has the largest drop-off: businesses are able to convert generated leads at a rate of 1-3%. Which means, the more opportunities you take to build relationships with leads, the higher your conversion rates will be. When building your first funnel, choose one or two marketing channels, create a funnel, and focus on improving the conversion rate.

If it takes seven times for a prospective customer to hear a message before becoming a buyer, stage two takes care of the second through fifth interaction — it’s that important to the overall success of the sales funnel. As this stage concludes, a prospective buyer should be familiar with the value you provide and confident you can solve their problems.

Stage 3: How Will You Stoke Consideration or Enhance the Offer?

Consideration (Middle of the Funnel)

At stage three, buyers are considering how your product or offering will fit into their life, including their budget, time commitments, and potential for transformation. They will also seek clear outcomes and knowledge of what to expect.

Your goal is to clearly define what life will be like with your product in it: what boons will they receive from their investment?

Make it easy to say, “yes!” to your product. Types of content for this stage include:

Discount codes
Free trials
Live demos or tutorials
Pricing page
Product comparisons
Customer testimonials
White papers
Webinars
Timely sales

This content might demonstrate the value of your product without the potential customer having to make a purchase. This stage is also ideal for increasing demand through social proof, test-runs, and a fear of missing out (FOMO). Alternatively, your approach could be to sweeten the deal with discount codes and exclusive bonuses, such as in the example below:

Darius created and sells a video game. He uses social media to create awareness of his product and sends traffic to a landing page. This landing page includes gameplay videos, customer testimonials, pricing, and a discount code for email subscribers.

When new subscribers do not use the discount code to buy the game, Darius sends them an onboarding email sequence. As it concludes, Darius offers the same discount, plus in-game bonuses, and sets a time limit on the offer.

Stage 4: How Can You Encourage Conversion?

Action (Bottom of the Funnel)

Leads become customers when they purchase a product or service. This action is the combined accomplishment of the prior three stages.

As this stage begins, the lead has moved from consideration to commitment by purchasing your product or offering.

There is no additional content to create or offer at this juncture. However, this stage is ideal for evaluation. Measure your results and determine where you can optimize your sales funnel.

Stage 5: How Will You Create a Stellar Customer Experience?

Customer Experience & Retention (Post Conversion)

When you cultivate relationships with customers beyond the monetary exchange, you cultivate loyal connections and encourage repeat buyers. Part of stage five is ensuring optimal customer satisfaction. Depending on the product sold, content for this stage might include:

Educational tools
Bonus materials
Tips for success
Private online groups
Training webinars
Follow-up support

Importantly, determine the best way to reach out and make yourself available for feedback, questions, and support. The more robust your customer service experience, the greater sense of community you will be able to build. In the example below, the author is able to cultivate community while encouraging repeat sales:

Rajesh writes a series of science fiction ebooks. As his fan base has grown, he realized there’s value in creating a community. Anyone who purchases one of his books receives exclusive access to an online Discord group.

Using this group, Rajesh hosts a monthly Q&A that gives fans an opportunity to connect with him as the author. After purchase, he sends a ‘Thank You’ email that provides instructions for adding the ebook to Kindle.

A week after purchase, he sends an automatic follow-up email that asks the reader to leave a review on Goodreads. It also features the next book in the series and reiterates that he’s available for feedback and customer support.

Repeat customers are the most loyal buyers in any business.

So much so, that 61% of small and medium businesses report that half of their revenue comes from repeat customers.

Beyond this stage, your goal is to enrich customer relationships and encourage reengagement with the brand. Focus on sharing new knowledge and cross-selling other products they might be interested in. Consider how your business can help them long term.

This segment of your audience is also the most likely to spread the word through a referral program or special offer. Consider the ways in which you can leverage these connections to improve your products and create repeat buyers who become loyal customers.

How to Create a Sales Funnel for Your Business (in 3 Steps)

Now, it’s time to put it all together. In stage two, we recommended beginning with one or two marketing channels, creating solid funnels, and improving their conversion rates.

As you cast wider nets with more top-of-the-funnel opportunities, it can become more difficult to refine. Consider scribbling a quick flow chart using the questions we offered with the stages.

With a clear idea of what you’re offering at each stage of the sales funnel, it’s time to create the content that will generate leads and nurture customer relationships.

1. Produce Content or Paid Advertising

We’ve already discussed the types of content you might produce for the top of the funnel. The key is to create content or run ad campaigns that target your ideal audience while casting a wide net of potential leads.

In all likelihood, you’re already producing this type of content. Review the most successful content you’ve created and consider how to reproduce its success or convert more people.

When in doubt, return to stage zero: engage with your audience to understand their pain points, wants, and needs. Then create content that is in alignment with your products and addresses their desires.

This step is on-going. It’s the marketing you continuously do to generate awareness of your business and build an audience.

The key is to refine the content you’re creating to encourage more and more people to convert from passive visitors to engaged audience members.

2. Create an Enticing Lead Magnet

Whether you are building an email list, registering users for a webinar, or directing traffic to a landing page, lead magnets encourage visitors to engage with your content and learn more.

This step is essential to generating prospective leads at scale.

The goal of your lead magnet is to provide something of real value to visitors that will persuade them to take a specific action.

This action might be to subscribe with their email address, allowing you to foster the relationship and send marketing promotions.

Alternatively, the action may be to visit a landing page or attend a webinar. There are endless ways to attract visitors and provide value.

Think of this as your ‘hook’. In the example below, the meal plan app uses free trials to ‘hook’ users and give them an opportunity to appreciate the service.

The meal plan app, Sweet Potato pays influencers to promote its products on their YouTube channel. When an influencer promotes Sweet Potato, they offer the audience a free month of meal plans when they use code: [InfluencerName]FreeTrial.

This discount code acts as a lead magnet, enticing the influencers’ viewers to visit the Sweet Potato website. It also acts as the incentive to say, “yes,” because a free month of meal plans allows potential customers to use the service before spending money.

This three-part sales funnel relies on the trust and authority the influencer has built with their audience, while appealing to a common pain point: cooking healthy meals. Furthermore, the company removes the initial cost to join, encouraging visitors to try the product.

This free trial is part of the company’s overall sales funnel. A successful conversion, in this case, would be when the customer subscribes by paying for the second month of meal plans.

Once a lead has taken this first step, they have officially shown interest in your business and have some awareness of your offerings. The next step is to build on that relationship.

3. Build an Email Sequence or Landing Page

Once a lead has shown interest in your business, how will you continue to offer value and bring them closer to the solution that is your product or service?

Depending on how you generated awareness of your business, this might be with a landing page or email sequence. While they are different methods of building trust, both options have the same goal: persuade a lead to buy.

Landing Page

A landing page outlines the various details of a product or offering. They can be short and to-the-point or many pages long. They often include:

Value propositions (that speak to user pain points)
A full description of the product or service
Testimonials or social proof
Who you are (credibility and background)
Pricing details
Guarantees
Frequently asked questions
Checkout buttons

Creating an enticing landing page is an art of its own. Focus on showcasing the transformation people will receive through purchasing your product and how your expertise will help them.

Email Sequence

An email sequence is a series of emails that are automatically triggered when a visitor completes an action, such as providing their email address in exchange for a lead magnet.

This automatic sequence sends follow-up correspondences designed to educate, inspire, and nurture leads.

Email sequences generally contain four to ten messages sent over the course of a few weeks or months. The sequence’s goal is to move prospective customers to the bottom of the funnel (toward conversion) and often provide significant, free value.

Lacy sells digital collages on her website. She creates search engine optimized blog posts to attract visitors. At the bottom of her blog posts, she offers a free email mini-course on Creating Digital Collages with Canva.

When a visitor provides their email address, this triggers the email sequence Lacy has created with her digital commerce platform. The first email automatically sends the new lead a welcome message that includes the course schedule, objectives, and a call-to-action.

The next day, the second email is sent; it contains the first lesson on how to create digital collages. Over the course of the next three weeks, the lead receives each lesson by email. This encourages the lead to develop a relationship with Lacy and her content. It also allows the lead to become familiar with Lacy’s teaching style and the quality of her knowledge.

At the end of the mini-course, Lacy sends a Congratulations! email, thanking the lead for participating. This email promotes Lacy’s digital artwork that’s for sale, as well as a paid course she sells on Living Collages: The Art of Combining Videos & Stil Art.

Email sequences are highly effective at leading prospective customers toward the bottom of the funnel, because they are an opportunity to create a stronger relationship with the lead.

The key is to provide knowledge with significant enough value that the entrepreneur could charge full-price for access.

This allows the creator to demonstrate their knowledge and convince the prospect that investing their money in the product will produce the results they seek.

Sales Funnels Try to Predict Customer Behavior

A successful sales funnel turns cold leads into loyal customers. But like all aspects of running a business, it won’t be perfect the first time. A simple funnel with room for improvement is 100% more effective than not having one.

Therefore, try different methods of reaching customers at each stage of the funnel, and don’t be afraid to tweak your messaging or create new lead magnets.

Remember: there is no objective way to consistently predict how users will move through your funnel and become a customer.

Ultimately, this is why sales funnels can become complicated, multi-headed entities. Start simple and add new branches to solve more specific problems for your customers. The most important aspect of a funnel is the relationships you build through them. Funnels are meant to help automate this process, not make it obsolete.

While the goal of a sales funnel is to convert leads, the focus and heart of a sales funnel must be on providing sincere value to customers and improving their experience.

When it’s time to sell your products, consider SendOwl. SendOwl is ideal for sales funnels:

Promote your lead magnet anywhere - no website necessary.
Create drip feed campaigns to nurture new leads.
Use payment links to send potential customers directly to checkout.

Try it free today.

How One Man’s Need for Extra Cash Became a Totally Rad Company

2022-07-14T19:18:53Z

In 2007, Doug Boutwell was a freelance wedding photographer who “just wanted some extra cash.” He became aware of Photoshop actions — editing shortcuts that can be saved and used repeatedly — as something he could sell.

Doug saw an opportunity and launched his first set.

To his surprise, the product took off and was a big success. Called the Totally Rad Action Mix, the name just stuck. It garnered word-of-mouth marketing and was featured in various blogs at the time. Recognizing he was onto something, Doug expanded.

Now, with four products in the line-up, Totally Rad makes photographers’ lives easier. Its mission is to create software that allows photographers to:

“Think less about the technology behind the tools they use and more about what they want to do and what they want to accomplish [with their photographs].”

As a one-man band, the business’ secret sauce is Doug’s ability to address his community’s pain points while running his business with sincerity.

Totally Rad’s Digital Products

Pro Retouch 2.0. Totally Rad’s best-selling product. This is a set of 30 Photoshop actions specifically designed around retouching skin for portrait photographers.

PicTapGo. A photo editor for iOS that is the company's most powerful and robust app. Features include 137 stackable filters, intuitive crop and rotate tool, and reusable recipes.

PixelSugar. A streamlined way to stack filters for photographers to get the look they want without using time-consuming tools on Mac.

Replicome. A set of three products for Lightroom, with each product emulating a suite of different films — many of which have since been discontinued on Lightroom.

The Power of Word-of-Mouth Marketing

When we asked Doug about his marketing efforts, he shook his head, “Nothing. Almost entirely word-of-mouth. That’s my challenge this year.” He explained that as a solopreneur, it’s all-too-easy to chase the shiny thing.

For Doug, the shiny thing is his mobile app, PicTapGo. Although PicTapGo is Totally Rad’s most robust and powerful photo editor, it’s been difficult to break through in the highly competitive mobile space.

“The truth is, most of our money comes from professionals buying stuff on the desktop.” Doug has been a successful entrepreneur for 15 years. During that time, word-of-mouth marketing and newsletter blasts have been the most powerful marketing tools for his business.

This year, Doug says, his challenge is to improve various marketing channels, including updating his landing page, refining value propositions, and building up a sales funnel again.

“We had a couple bets not work out the way I wanted. We tried to pair down, largely because I put a lot of eggs in the mobile basket and that didn’t work out.” Totally Rad recently signed a publishing contract with a company to manage marketing for the mobile app, allowing Doug to refocus his energy.

While he may humbly state, “I suck at marketing,” this photographer-turned-software developer and proud father of two is adept at serving his community with products that de-complicate photo-editing for photographers.

Fighting Cynicism with Integrity

It’s not just the quality of the products that keeps Totally Rad in business: it’s Doug’s sincere desire to take care of the people who make him successful. During the 20-minute conversation, it became clear that Doug’s approach to business is abundantly genuine,

“I never wanted to be cynical about what we did. If you’re going to entrust us with your money and in exchange we’re going to provide you with this product — if it’s broken we’re going to fix it. If it doesn’t work, we’re going to bust our asses [to make it right].”

Doug’s policy is to make his customers happy or give them their money back. With a small group of diehard fans, he remarks that being sensitive to that is crucial for creating loyalty.

Yet it’s his desire to wake up in the morning and feel good about what he’s doing that motivates Doug to stand in his integrity. ”I feel good about the way we’ve treated our customers over the years, and I think they feel the same.”

Advice for Creator Entrepreneurs

When we asked Doug what advice he would give small business owners and side hustlers struggling to take off, he reflected on the experiences that have taught him the most:

1) Give yourself grace as an entrepreneur (and person)

“There’s been a lot of getting knocked down a peg,” explained Doug. “Maybe it would have happened in other arenas. But the wins and losses are much bigger when it’s your business.

“The risks you take are bigger. The amount of money that evaporates when you spend money on building a product that fails.”

He went on to say, “ I think [I’ve learned to] not hold myself to standards that I wouldn’t hold other people to and to recognize that ‘Yeah, you’re going to screw up. It’s okay. Life goes on.’

“There’s a lot of joy — even when things aren’t working out — if you don’t wrap up your entire identity in work.”

2) Be grateful, even if it’s for your daily cup of joe

“Years ago, I saw some Facebook ad for this [daily gratitude] journal — everyday you fill out the page. I did that for a while and realized, ‘okay, I like this.’ But what I really took away from it was: everyday, write down three things you’re grateful for.

With the shifting events of the world, “I was having to really, really struggle to find things to write down to be happy about. Even though, materially, I recognize we are exceptionally privileged.”

He noted that finding the smallest thing can be enough, “Uh, I'm thankful for this cup of coffee…it helps. It makes a big difference — being able to find even little stuff, and really be grateful for it, is important.”

3) Be willing to fail in order to succeed.

The main advice Doug has for aspiring creator’s is simple:

“Perfect is the enemy of the good. Just do things. Go.”

As an “analysis paralysis guy,” Doug advocates for sidelining perfectionism in favor of making things and putting them out into the world. “For people like me, just do it.”

At one point in his business, Doug had six or seven employees. Now it’s just him. But during our conversation, Doug reflected on missing the pressures of being a boss. “I felt like I had to be the person they expected me to be — who I totally wasn’t.”

Doug admits that there is a lot of anxiety wrapped up in operating that way, but it also pushed him to be better, “There was a scramble to go out and be smarter and more capable…I need to find a way to do that again: be beholden to someone’s impossible expectations of me.”

Totally Rad is “almost back in a startup place.” Doug was incredibly candid about what has and has not worked for his business over the years. But, whether by experience or natural inclination, Doug is skilled at handling foundational aspects of his business: his products solve pain points, he leads with integrity, and he’s willing to fail — which means he’s able to succeed.

Why Totally Rad Chose SendOwl

The vast majority of Totally Rad’s products are sold through the SendOwl platform. When he switched away from self-hosted carts, Doug was searching for a light-weight, customizable platform — and he didn’t need (or want to pay for) physical product ecommerce features.

“We just need hosted digital downloads and an easy, almost invisible integration with our website. SendOwl provided both of those.”

Doug appreciates that the SendOwl platform doesn’t require further integration. SendOwl handles all of his transactions and provides the records alongside analytics.

“It’s just enough. The price didn’t hurt either. I think it’s probably the best value of any [platform].”

Doug also remarked that SendOwl’s customer service has contributed to his loyalty, “You guys have been great every time I’ve had an opportunity or need to reach out beyond just the day-to-day usage of the platform. So thank you; good job.”

Try SendOwl For Free.

How to Create Your First Online Course in 5 Easy Steps

2022-07-07T22:20:48Z

Creating an online course allows entrepreneurs, within any niche, to deliver their unique perspective and teaching style in a way that makes money, delivers value, and scales endlessly.

Of the 1,000 creators the Tilt surveyed, 39% cited online courses as a source of income. For good reason: courses are one of the most profitable digital products for creators to sell. With the e-learning industry expected to grow to $325 billion by 2025 (from $107 billion in 2015), there’s no better time to create a course for your audience.

Online courses are most successful when they solve pain points and deliver a transformative experience.

This article is designed to help you create a minimum viable product. A minimum viable product is the earliest version of a product with enough value to attract early customers and validate the idea. With this approach, entrepreneurs are able to receive feedback in the early stages and improve the product for students.

By the end of this article, you will have all of the information necessary to create your first online course in the following five steps:

Choose a Topic & Type of Course
Establish Outline & Learning Outcomes
Create Course Content & Deliverables
Determine Delivery Structure & Pricing
Plan Course Launch & Sell

As you move through this process, avoid falling into traps of perfectionism. You can improve the course with time. For now, focus on offering the highest quality information with the least amount of initial time investment. Once you have a minimum viable product, you can test the response and tweak both your course materials and the marketing as necessary.

1. Choose a Topic & Type of Course

When choosing a course topic, interact with the community your course intends to serve — you will learn what topics are in high demand, as well as the best type of course to deliver and how.

As you brainstorm topics, reflect on the following questions:

What knowledge do I have that others are yearning for?
How does my business solve pain points for users?
What comes naturally to me that others struggle with?
How can my knowledge/talents/passion catalyze joy for others?

No matter how much you do or do not know, there is someone else seeking the information you already possess.

Across niches, creators are building successful businesses around the courses they sell. There are various approaches to creating a course; don’t be afraid to innovate in order to deliver an experience you know your audience will love.

Types of Online Courses

Once you have an idea for your product, the next step is to determine what type of course you want to create. Ultimately, this comes down to how you will structure and deliver your course.

Common types of courses include:

eLearning courses (often interactive)
Drip feed courses (distributed by email on a schedule)
Webinars & workshops
Live courses

eLearning Courses

eLearning is an umbrella term for online courses; they often include an interactive or assessment component. These courses can be formal (to gain certification or college credit) or informal (to learn a new skill or hobby).

eLearning courses are generally organized into modules, which act as organizing chapters for the content. Each module includes lessons that break the topic down further to cover it in-depth.

Lessons often have a video, additional text information or the transcript for the video, and quizzes or downloadable worksheets for integrating what the student has learned.

In professional certification courses and formal education classes, it is common to include quizzes or assessments at the end of each lesson or module. Informal classes generally include worksheets, calls-to-action, and encourage community participation.

eLearning courses often include a student-only online community, as well as lifetime access to future updates of the course.

Drip Feed Courses

Drip feed courses deliver each chapter of the course on a set schedule. The content is delivered by email and often includes video, text, and worksheets or calls-to-action.

This type of course encourages student engagement by delivering the course on a predictable schedule and only sharing the information they need to learn that week (day, month).

Drip feed courses are ideal for generating passive income. Once purchased, the automatic delivery of the course allows the student to be guided through a course without manual input from the creator. This type of course can also be used as a lead magnet to collect email addresses in exchange for the value being offered.

Simple Green Smoothies utilizes a drip feed course to promote its 10-Day Green Smoothie Challenge. This is a great example of an opt-in offer that appeals directly to the pain points of the visitor: “how do I easily improve my health?” Simple Green Smoothies offers an easy solution and free email course, including recipes, to jumpstart the healthy habit.

Coined as a challenge, people are motivated to participate and Simple Green Smoothies is able to grow its email list. This allows the company to sell its meal plans and recipe books directly to the people that have already shown interest. In doing so, Simple Green Smoothies has created an efficient sales funnel.

Webinars & Workshops

Webinars and workshops are presented in real-time. Generally hosted on a video communications platform (such as Zoom), live courses either instruct or involve the audience.

Webinars are perfect for live courses or master classes — wherein the teacher instructs a small group, giving attention to each individual. This type of course is also ideal for on-going instructional groups, such as poetry workshops or wine and painting clubs.

Live Courses

Live courses are offered at a specific time of year. The creator opens the doors to purchase the course, the participants complete the course as a group in a set timeframe, and the course is (usually) not available until the next time it’s launched — often yearly or biannually.

This type of course is ideal for helping people stay engaged and accountable. It requires more from the creator, because live courses provide a range of offerings, including (but not limited to):

Weekly or monthly workshops with the creator
Lifetime access to future workshops
Downloadable workbook for deeper learning
Access to a community of current participants

Live courses create opportunities for creators to actively engage with participants, helping to guide the intended transformation.

There are hundreds of variations on the types of courses you can create. But the four models above outline the most common ways to build and deliver a course.

Average Time Investment: 2 Hours for Research & Brainstorming

2. Establish Outline & Learning Outcomes

Break your topic down into chapters or modules. Each section should teach one skill or aspect of the course. Overall, determine the ‘Point A’, where students begin, and the ‘Point B’ that your course leads them to by transforming their knowledge, perspective, or skill set.

During this step, you will also begin to develop your own teaching style. In all likelihood, the information you’re sharing can be found somewhere else. But the audience who buys your course wants to learn from you.

Therefore, remember to incorporate your personality, quarks, and community insight. Your information should focus on the student — but who you are and how you teach is the special sauce that creates superfans.

Create an Outline

The type of course you create will affect how you outline the course. eLearning and Live courses generally organize the topic into modules then lessons. For example:

Topic: Writing a Memoir

Example Modules:

Interviewing yourself
Determining the core narrative
How to integrate facts into prose
Three acts & the hero’s journey
Outlines don’t need to be scary
Writing the first chapter
Writing the next chapter, and the next one…
Bonus: The many paths to publishing

Example Lessons for Module: Interviewing yourself

What’s your story? (A writing exercise)
Press record: getting to know yourself
The importance of morning pages
Preparing to face the inner critic
What’s your boon? The gift from the grit?

Drip-feed courses can be broken down into modules and lessons as well. However, drip-feed courses often organize the main topic into digestible chapters. Each chapter teaches one aspect of the overall topic and is delivered by email.

Webinars and workshops have the most unique and varied structures. A creator can offer a series of webinars, a single workshop on a specific subject, or host a membership program for on-going classes. Workshops can also be offered as part of a Live course or used to generate leads for a larger course.

With your structure in mind, map out each skill the student will need to learn to gain the knowledge and transformation they’re seeking.

Consider what additional resources they will need along the way: blog posts, worksheets, quizzes, calls-to-action, etc. You might also include bonuses, which entice potential customers and provide additional, highly relevant information.

Establish Learning Outcomes

Before you move on, write down three to five learning outcomes for your course. These are meant to clearly define the skills students will acquire by taking the course. This exercise is helpful for gaining clarity and identifying value propositions (why someone would want to buy the course).

Questions for identifying learning outcomes include:

When a student takes the course, what is the Point A they are starting from and the Point B my course leads them to? Why do they take this journey?

What transformation does my course seek to create and what is necessary to ensure that transformation takes place?

Who is my course for and why would they want to purchase it? What pain points am I solving? How does my course improve their life?

With your answers in mind, write a list of learning outcomes. The strongest learning outcomes begin with a measurable verb, as outlined by Bloom’s Taxonomy.

For a jumping-off point, use the phrase, “By the end of this course, you will have the skills to…” Continuing with our example, the learning outcomes for a course on Writing Memoir might include:

Confidently translate life experiences into engaging prose.
Construct a narrative outline of your book.
Employ tools for overcoming writer’s block.
Compose the first draft of your memoir!

While this step requires a lot of brainstorming and decision-making, it sets the course creator up for success moving forward.

Next, we will create the course content and deliverables. A strong outline will allow the creator to move more swiftly through the next step.

Returning to the Goal: Minimum Viable Product

As you create your outline and learning outcomes, determine what aspects are essential to delivering the course results. In other words, figure out the structural information that students need immediately, as well as the topics and chapters that can be added later.

You do not need to create the most advanced version of your course right away. With this approach, you’re allowing yourself to fully flesh out your ideas without creating the course in its entirety before selling it and proving the concept.

Indeed, consider pausing here to create a landing page from what you know. Then use that landing page to pre-sell the course or collect email addresses before launch.

There are various platforms that allow you to create a free landing page (i.e. Mailchimp).

Allow yourself to create a product that delivers on its value proposition while investing the least amount of time possible. When you release new content, current students will appreciate the additional information. Importantly, you will have ensured the product is wanted before spending time creating all of the materials.

Average Time Investment: 5-15 Hours (Dependent on Course Size)

3. Create Course Content & Deliverables

Now it’s time to get down to the knitty-gritty. To create the most engaging course possible, this step generally includes writing, filming, and editing videos.

Ultimately, consider how to present your information in the way that will be most appealing to your audience. It’s also important to create course materials with different learning styles in mind, including:

Visual
Auditory
Kinesthetic
Reading/writing

On average, course creators will want to incorporate two or more of the major learning styles, if not all of them. This ensures that people of various learning styles have the opportunity to fully absorb the content.

Filming & Editing Videos

There are various ways to include video content with a course. The two most common and low-tech ways are:

Film yourself presenting information.
Use visuals, screen-recordings, or a powerpoint with voice-over.

Oftentimes, creators will use a mix of both. They might present information on-screen, then cut to a screen-recording with voice-over to explain the details.

Equipment

Unless you already have a camera, a smartphone is perfectly adequate for filming. Purchasing a camera is a worthwhile investment in the future. But the quality of information you capture will always matter more than production value.

The same is true of editing softwares for videos. Unless you already own software, stick with a free option:

iMovie is an easy-to-use editing software included on Mac computers.
Lightworks works with all the major operating systems.

Video editors often recommend investing in an external hard drive. This prevents you from needing a computer with significant RAM or disk space. It also protects your work.

Worksheets, Assessments & Calls-to-Action

Another part of creating your course is making additional materials for deeper learning. This can take many forms, from quizzes and worksheets to ebooks and spreadsheets. This can also include calls-to-action, also known as homework.

For each lesson, consider what other resources you can provide and what students need to learn in order to progress.

Deliverables often come in the form of PDFs. Adobe Acrobat comes with a free trial but requires monthly fees thereafter. Canva is a free alternative that makes it easy to design any graphic with little-to-no experience. It also offers an array of free templates to help you get started.

Deliverables and calls-to-action allow students to apply what they’ve learned. This helps students absorb the information and encourages engagement with the material.

Average Time Investment: 40 - 120 Hours (The Bulk of the Work)

4. Determine Delivery Structure & Pricing

Once your course is complete, how will you deliver it to your audience? The type of course you create often helps to determine the delivery method. There are a plethora of options and platforms you can use to sell, including marketplaces, course builders, and ecommerce platforms. SendOwl makes it easy for content entrepreneurs to sell their digital products anywhere online. Here’s how.

How to Create an Online Course with SendOwl

SendOwl can be used to create and automatically deliver any type of online course. With a full suite of tools for creators, SendOwl makes it possible to securely and automatically deliver digital goods. Sell directly to your audience or via your website and share new lessons daily, weekly, or monthly using payment links and checkout buttons. It’s also highly affordable and requires the least amount of technical know-how.

Sell Access to Your eLearning Course

Start by creating a members-only area of your website. You can use password-protected pages or create membership accounts for users to log in.

Integrate SendOwl payment links or embed checkout buttons with your website. Once a student purchases your course, they will automatically receive an email with the information needed to access the content. You can set up payment gateways for Stripe or PayPal to automate payment processing.

Wordpress users can even integrate SendOwl with various membership plugins, including Wishlist Member, s2Member Pro, and MemberMouse.

Deliver Your Course on Schedule (Drip Feed)

Drip feed courses are shared by email on a set schedule. When a student purchases the course, they automatically receive the first email that you have customized. This email generally introduces the course details, as well as what to expect and when.

When creating a drip feed course with SendOwl, you can create an email sequence to be delivered on a predetermined schedule. Once a student purchases the course, they will automatically receive each new section by email on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

This is a great way to keep students engaged in the material without needing to manually deliver the content. It also allows students to work at their own pace, while encouraging them to complete the course on a timeline.

Additionally, these courses can be sold anywhere online with SendOwl. You can even create a shoppable one-pager for your link-in-bio across social media platforms, allowing you to send traffic directly to checkout.

Host a Live Course or On-going Class

Finally, a live course or on-going class can be sold as a drip feed course (as outlined above) or on a subscription basis. Subscriptions allow you to provide students with access to any of the digital files you host with SendOwl — including videos, worksheets, quizzes, and more.

This model allows you to charge a recurring monthly subscription fee. Once a student purchases a subscription to the course, automatically deliver all of the information needed to access the materials — whether that’s a Zoom link, members-only Discord group, how-to content, or other deliverables.

How to Price Your Online Course

When figuring out how to price your online course, consider where the course fits into your business. Online courses fit into business models in a few different ways:

Lead generation. Generate newsletter subscriptions by using your online course as a free opt-in offer (also known as a lead magnet). Collect emails in exchange for access.

Passive income. Many creators sell multiple courses that can be purchased at any time and are self-directed by the student. This allows the creator to receive passive income from the course. These courses range from a few bucks to hundreds of dollars.

Main product & stream of income. Courses with highly valuable skills, and those offered live, often cost more and make up a larger percentage of the creator’s annual revenue. These courses range from a few hundred dollars to thousands.

Memberships & subscriptions. Billed monthly, this model allows creators to continually create new valuable content or offer community benefits alongside course information. Since creators charge a monthly fee for access, prices vary greatly ($5 to $150 a month or more) depending on what’s included and the value of the knowledge.

With the knowledge of where your course fits in your overall business model, what other factors do you need to consider when pricing a course?

Content Value

Do not undervalue, and therefore underprice, your knowledge. This is a challenge for many creators. To avoid this, research your competition, review accredited courses on the subject, and use the Google Keyword Planner to see how valuable the topic is to advertisers (which translates to customer demand).

Use this to determine where your course fits within the market, rather than as a way to choose your pricing.

Miranda researches her competition and discovers someone selling a course on the same topic as her own. The competition is charging $600 and claims to teach the student everything they need to know. But when Miranda looks at what the course includes, she becomes confident that her course is offering far more value and aiding students in unique ways.

Miranda leverages this knowledge when marketing — not by pointing out the competition, but by focusing on what her course offers that goes above and beyond.

Before, she was struggling to charge $400 for the course. But having reviewed competitors who charge much less and far more, she realizes that her course has enough value (and herself enough credibility) to charge $1000 per student.

Use research to help form a more complete understanding of how to price your course.

In the example above, Miranda might have realized the exact opposite: that her course was more of an introduction to the topic, rather than a walkthrough. She may have decided to charge less or even turn the course into a lead magnet for collecting emails.

Either way, she used her research of the competition to inform her pricing, rather than determine it. This is important because, more often than not, competing on price will hurt your bottom line and depreciate the value of your product.

Established Credibility

How easy or difficult will it be for you to sell your course to the audience you already have? If you’ve established significant credibility in your niche, you may be in a position to command premium pricing.

Seth Godin is a prime example of this. For over a decade, he has built his brand around daily blogging and selling short, highly useful books on entrepreneurship. But Seth also hosts an intensive course called the altMBA.

This 31-day guided course requires potential students to apply and be accepted into the program. It also costs $4,450. Why does this work? Seth has tremendous credibility in the business world. He has continually created and shipped work that is beloved by online entrepreneurs around the world.

If you are not established in your niche, creating authority and trust with your free content is key. This aspect of marketing is on-going and will build upon itself with time. You do not need to have established credibility within a niche to successfully launch a course. By being aware of the credibility you’ve built, you will be able to more easily identify your true fans and create products they love.

Profit Margins

Profit margins are determined by dividing profit by total revenue. This measures how much money a business is making in profit for each dollar made.

Online businesses that sell digital products are often able to generate profit margins of 85% and above — compared to 7 to 10%, which is considered good for other small businesses.

If your profit margins are too low, you will not have capital to invest in promoting the course, nor will you be motivated to invest your time in doing so. You’ll also want to consider how much money the course will make as it scales. Consider the example below:

Alder is trying to price their course on designing a tiny house. Originally, they planned to sell it for $50. But after doing some research, they decide to test $80 and see how their audience responds. They spend $200 creating the course.

They launch the course to a segment of their email list with 100 people. This generates five sales. At $50 per student, their course generates a 20% profit margin ($50 in profit). When charging $80, however, their profit margin jumps to 50% ($200 in profit).

After refining their price with this experiment, Alder launches the course to the other 700 people on their email list. In two weeks, they make 50 sales. Based on this information, Alder determines that by charging $80 instead of $50, they made $3,800 in profit, instead of $2,300 — that’s a difference of $1,500.

On the surface, a price increase of $30 doesn’t seem like much. But Alder now has more cash to reinvest in marketing and expansion.

For many new course creators, the inclination is to choose a price they think others will pay. The challenge, therefore, is to set a price that’s a little higher than you feel comfortable charging.

You can always change your pricing in the future. Pick a price and adjust as needed. Track your sales conversion rates to make informed decisions on whether to change your pricing strategy, adjust marketing, or improve upon the product itself.

Average Time Investment: 20 Hours (Course Structure & Pricing)

5. Plan Course Launch & Sell

You’ve done it! You’ve created a course and you're ready to share it with the world. Now what? Before you can make your first sale, you’ve got to promote your product.

The best way to promote new products is with a launch. A launch generates excitement for an upcoming product, while offering a discounted price or special bonus for being an early adopter.

When you launch a product, a key component of making the sale is your landing page. A landing page outlines the benefits of a product and persuades readers to buy. Let’s discuss.

Create a Sales Page

The goal of this page is to convert browsers into buyers. Your landing page (also known as a sales page) should empathize with your audience’s pain points and illustrate how your course will transform their experience, perspective, or skills.

Use value propositions to showcase why someone should buy your product. Share a full description of the course, as well as what is included (bonuses, worksheets, etc).

Break up the wall of text with videos, bolded key features, bullet points to highlight benefits, and headers to make your value-propositions stand out. Your sales page should also include:

Testimonials (once acquired)
Who you are (your credibility)
Frequently asked questions
Pricing details
Your return policy
Checkout buttons

Your conversion rate is determined by the number of people that buy your product after landing on the sales page, divided by the number of people who only visit the page. You can use this information to determine how well your landing page is performing.

Johnny sends an email to his list of 2,000 people, of which 400 click through to his landing page. Only 5 people buy the product. Johnny’s conversion rate is a measly 1% (5/400). Johnny decides to spend more time talking to his audience. He knows his course can help, but he’s not sure how to position the messaging.

After listening to a few people discuss their wants and needs, Johnny adjusts the text on his landing page and sends out another promotion. This time, 300 people click-through to the landing page. Of this group, 25 people buy the course. That’s a significant improvement, with a conversion rate of 8% (25/300).

Remember, you can always tweak and adjust this page later. Focus on creating a solid structure that you can optimize once you’ve collected analytical data. After you’ve created a landing page, it’s time to plan your course launch.

Plan Your Launch

There are many approaches to launching a new product. Entrepreneurs will often employ multiple techniques to reach their audience across channels. This includes:

Webinars. These allow entrepreneurs to offer free value, build trust, and sell their product (often at a special price) in the span of a couple hours. In fact, 53% of marketers feel webinars generate the highest quality leads when used at the top of a funnel.

Lead magnets. Also known as opt-in offers, this might be a mini version of your course, ebook, or PDF that’s offered in exchange for email addresses. As the free content concludes, you can offer the full course for complete immersion in the topic.

Paid advertising. Paid advertising is ideal for generating new leads to a business and can be re-targeted, which is to advertise to the audience that engaged with past advertisements or the brand in general.

Social posts. Social media posts allow you to promote your course across channels. Integrate your promotions into the style of your regular content. This will help with engagement and reach, as algorithms are adept at ignoring promotional material.

Email blasts. Within most industries, email marketing still generates the most sales transactions. That means your email list is a highly valuable asset to your business. While you don’t want to overwhelm your prospects, email blasts are an essential part of any product launch.

Third-party features. Whether in the form of a guest blog post or podcast interview, third-party features include any kind of promotion that prominently features you (or your niche) and directs traffic directly to your website or product.

Influencer marketing. A form of paid advertising, influencer marketing relies on the trust and authority someone else has built with their audience. Influencers are paid to share a product with their audience. Companies often provide a discount code to entice potential customers and to track the success of the campaign.

Affiliate programs. When you have affiliates who sell your product, they do the marketing work and receive a percentage of the sale. This is a great way to broaden your reach and access niche communities.

All of the above can be used in your on-going marketing plan beyond launch day too. While you do not need to use all of these techniques, try to incorporate three or four into your launch plan.

Next, decide how long your launch period will be. Will you have the doors of your course open for a few months, then close them for the rest of the year? Will you promote the product for two weeks, then launch it and create an on-going marketing plan?

Create a content calendar to stay on top of what needs to be created, published, and promoted. Also consider if and how you will motivate leads to buy; options include: a time-sensitive discount that will expire, extra bonuses offered to pre-launch customers only, a limited number of class spots, and more.

You’re ready to sell! Start your product launch and begin selling your course to the first group of customers. Once you launch the course, solicit feedback and review the data. Both of which will be crucial for improving your course and continuing to acquire new customers.

Average Time Investment: 20-60 Hours (Create Sales Page & Launch)

Next Steps: Improve Your Course & Acquire New Customers

Once your course is out in the world, with real students absorbing and applying the information, it’s time to revisit your minimum viable product. To serve current students and attract new ones, solicit students’ feedback, improve the course, and execute an on-going marketing strategy.

Solicit Feedback & Improve Your Course

Online courses often include access to all future updates of the course. This creates trust and encourages students to collaborate with the creator to make an even better product.

Once your course has active students, solicit their feedback with an email or survey. Review the additional course content and materials you’re planning to add. Ensure that new course content is in alignment with what students need to better understand the topic and apply the information.

As you add new content, inform your students of the additional information they’re getting and ask them to provide feedback and promote the course word-of-mouth or as an affiliate.

Eventually, you may reach a point where there is nothing else you need to add. Revisit your course on a yearly basis to ensure the materials are relevant and up-to-date.

Develop an On-Going Marketing Strategy

With consideration to the various marketing methods listed above, create an on-going marketing strategy. When developing a marketing plan, it is helpful to plan sprints and marathons.

Sprints are marketing efforts that can be executed quickly and produce fast, often short-term, results. Marathons are the marketing efforts that produce consistent results in the long-term and require a continued time investment.

Paid advertising, webinars, and influencer marketing are great examples of marketing methods that can be done in sprints. While blog posts optimized for SEO, lead magnets, and affiliate programs are marathon marketing strategies.

Social media posts can go either way: Instagram and Twitter require sprints; while content designed to be searchable on YouTube and Pinterest utilize marathon marketing.

It’s important for most marketing plans to include a bit of both. However, prioritize marathon marketing strategies to create a sustainable business model, especially if you are a solopreneur or your business is a side hustle.

Top 3 Pitfalls for Course Creators to Avoid

We’ve discussed the importance of pricing strategy and the necessity of a course launch. While the process of creating and selling a course will teach you the most, here are three mistakes to avoid on the path to becoming a successful course creator.

Not Building an Audience

In the vast world of online courses, one of the most challenging aspects is bringing awareness to your course and acquiring students.

The solution: Create a marketing funnel that attracts potential customers, builds trust, and strengthens the connections between you and your audience.

The likelihood of launching a successful course is significantly increased by building an audience before release.

Your audience might include social media followers, podcast listeners, blog readers, email subscribers, and more.

Not Completing the Course

Once the excitement of an idea has worn off and a creator is in the process of building their course content, it can become all-too-easy to become overwhelmed, discouraged, or distracted.

The solution: Instead, ground your ‘why’ in how your course will improve someone else’s life. What is the vision in your heart that will get you out of bed in the morning to create your course (potentially before working a full time job)?

Creating a course is a project. At the beginning, determine your ‘why’ for creating the course beyond personal gain.

While it is motivating to know that the money (or freedom) generated from the course will improve your life, there are often other thoughts wrapped up in that too (“What if it doesn’t succeed? What if I’m wasting my time?”).

If you find yourself getting stuck along the way, return to your outline. You may find that the topic needs to be broken down into smaller segments.

Not Validating the Course Idea

Prove your product concept as soon as possible. This is key to creating a successful course (with a profitable conversion rate). There are many ways to go about this, but one of the most effective is to create a landing page that promotes the course before you create it.

The solution: Create a landing page and lead magnet to promote your course to your audience before creating it. Use this to validate your idea and solicit early feedback on your topic.

Instead of using this page to convert sales, create a lead magnet (such as a mini version of your course) that your audience can receive for free in exchange for their email address.

We mentioned that this is effective for building an audience, but it also serves as a way to validate your product idea with those who are already part of your audience.

You can also use the mini-course to solicit early feedback on core topics your course will cover and learn more about what students are interested in, struggling with, and want to know.

A Note on Mental Roadblocks

The gap between creating something and knowing that others want what you’ve created is scary for everyone: artists, entrepreneurs, makers, musicians, designers, inventors.

You don’t need to have it all figured out. Follow each of the steps above until you have a product to share. Then send it out in the world and let it become its own entity. Whether it succeeds or fails is not personal to you; it is not a determinant of your value or ability.

Take your time in the planning phases, create your course with intentionality, and be receptive to feedback from potential customers and students.

There is no wrong way to do this. There are a million different perfectly good and wonderful approaches to creating and selling an online course. SendOwl makes it easy to get started without spending a dime: try it free — no website needed; no credit card required.

The Concept of 1,000 True Fans

2022-06-24T22:22:46Z

In the creator economy of today, over two million small business creators make more than six figures in yearly income. This number is growing: creators who earned a living wage (greater than $69K/year) increased 41% in the last year alone.

Creators succeed with various business models, across infinite niches. Every creator knows that building a following is essential. But how many followers are truly needed?

In 2008, Kevin Kelly introduced the concept of 1,000 True Fans, which reframed what it meant to be a successful creative entrepreneur. Now, the updated version stands as a framework for helping creators realize that success is more achievable than entrepreneurs may think.

Put simply, Kevin argues that a creator only needs 1,000 people willing to provide $100 each year of profit in order to generate $100,000 of annual income.

Creators don’t need a million fans. To achieve financial stability with a creative business, it’s not necessary to win the ‘viral’ lottery or appeal to the masses.

For the millions of people whose goal it is to become a successful creator, this framework shows the value of having a hyper-engaged audience and building relationships based on trust.

In fact, writer Li Jin argues that creators really only need 100 true fans to make a living (we’ll get into that later). Not everyone agrees though. Over the years, marketers have pointed out the flaws in assuming it only takes 1,000 (or 100) people to keep a business running — with some going so far as to call it a myth.

So which is it? What model is the most realistic? We’ll explore the concept in its entirety, review potential hiccups, discuss Li Jin’s model for creators of today, and answer how to cultivate true fans in your business.

What is a True Fan? & Why Do I Need 1,000?

Not every fan or follower will become a “true fan,” and they don’t need to be.

In his essay, Kelly defines a true fan as someone who will buy anything a creator makes. These are the fans that will drive 200 miles to see a performance, buy every version of the book, and purchase new products on loyalty and trust alone.

The math is simple: $100 profit X 1,000 true fans = $100,000 income.

Of course, there are a few other factors necessary to make the framework viable:

The creator must be able to produce enough each year to generate $100 of profit from each true fan.

The relationship to the fan must be direct. This is essential to receiving the full (or close to) $100 in profit from each true fan — without giving large percentages away to labels, studios, publishers, and similar entities.

The first point, importantly, highlights that this model doesn’t factor in expenses, which is important to consider when determining pricing and estimating profit from selling digital products.

The second point highlights the old-world model, wherein publishers and studios determined whose creative work was successful. The concept of 1,000 true fans requires creators to bypass these gatekeepers and develop personal relationships with the audience that wants their work.

Furthermore, Kelly argues that these gatekeepers — in the form of corporations, intermediaries, and commercial producers — are ill-equipped to connect with audiences across niches. This provides a huge opportunity for creators to produce content for a specific audience and cultivate diehard fans for their business.

Is 1,000 Fans a Myth?

The framework of 1,000 true fans is sound but not without its challenges. From conversion rates to customer churn, there are plenty of valid reasons why this simple concept doesn’t make for easy or guaranteed success.

Popular marketer and blogger, Mark Schaefer says that the idea is helpful for motivation but ultimately a myth. Based on his own experiences as a successful creator, he shared the numbers from his social media followers, blog subscribers, and podcast listeners.

Schaefer’s conclusions hold valuable wisdom: he discusses the importance of promotion and building momentum. But the “weak relational links” of his social media following highlight the importance of cultivating and maintaining relationships when attracting 1,000 true fans.

Instead of dismissing the idea as myth, it is important to be informed of the caveats. Within this framework of achievable success, what challenges do creative entrepreneurs need to be aware of? Let’s discuss.

Conversion Rates

Conversion rate is the number of people who complete a task, divided by the number of people that were asked to complete the task.

A conversion rate of less than 10% is normal for sales conversions, with 2-5% generally considered good.

Sales conversion rates will vary based on many factors, including user experience and industry. An audience that is not familiar with a creator’s work will convert at a much lower rate than the audience that a creator has developed trust and authority with.

Linda sends out a newsletter with a call-to-action to buy her new book. Of the 2,000 people on her list, 1,300 open the email. 700 people click on the link and view the book on her website. Of those 700 that click, 25 buy the book.

Of the 1,300 people Linda was able to reach, 25 completed the task. Therefore, Linda’s sales conversion rate for this email was just under 2% (25 / 1,300 = 0.019).

Based on this information, Linda has learned a couple things:

It would be beneficial to increase her open rates. She might implement A/B testing on email headlines to see if there is an improvement.

A lot of people are interested in her book (700 clicked through) but only 25 were motivated to buy. Linda should consider improving the landing page or sending readers directly to checkout with payment links. She may even test both and see which performs better.

The example above fails to consider the work Linda has already done to have 2,000 emails on her list that she can send a promotion.

While a creator (using this model) only needs 1,000 true fans to buy their products, they will need to attract a larger and more general audience, some of whom will become true fans.

In the context of the example above, it’s likely that Linda reached upwards of 200,000 people to acquire the 2,000 emails on her list. Generating leads for a business has a measly 1-3% conversion rate.

Additionally, this doesn’t take into account the number of times someone needs to interact with a creator’s content before converting (the average being seven times).

Profits, Revenue & Income

In his essay, Kelly highlights the amount of profit creators need to generate from each true fan. He also notes the importance of creating direct relationships with fans, so that all of the profit can be kept by the creator.

But even small online businesses have expenses.

Therefore, it is important for creators to determine their business expenses and adjust accordingly.

Furthermore, it is wise for businesses to reinvest 20-30% of profits back into the business. When creators are paying themselves, they should consider if and how much of their profit they want to save for future business expenses and unforeseen challenges.

Consider the 50-30-20 rule, which suggests that business owners pay themselves 50% of the profit, reinvest 30%, and save 20% for taxes. While this model does not work for all businesses, it provides a framework to adjust as needed.

Shakera generated $120,000 in revenue with her business last year. She pays $300 a month for her tech stack and spent $5,000 on marketing. Therefore, Shakera’s business profit from the year was $111,400.

Shakera is planning on getting married the following year and wants to ensure she has plenty of time to spend on planning. Knowing she will spend less time in her business, she intentionally sets aside 30% ($33,420) of her profits for savings and reinvestment, as well as 20% ($22,280) for taxes.

Therefore, Shakera pays herself $55,700 for the year.

A small business may decide it does not need to reserve 30% of profits for reinvestment or savings, but doing so provides security for unforeseen events and capital for increasing brand awareness and revenue.

Customer Churn

Within the concept of 1,000 true fans, there is no discussion of customer churn. When a customer who once interacted with or purchased from a business no longer does, this is considered churn. Customers leaving is an inevitable part of any business. Therefore, businesses need to consistently attract new customers, who may become true fans.

In other words, a creator’s marketing efforts are not done once they have acquired 1,000 true fans. The process of building and maintaining relationships is on-going. It is important to measure and increase customer retention. Understanding why customers leave has the potential to improve your bottom line and customer experience overall.

A New Model for Creators: 100 True Fans

One of the ways to get around needing 1,000 true fans is to sell digital products that cost significantly more. A course that costs $1,000 only needs 100 buyers to generate that same $100,000 of revenue.

For many creators, it doesn’t make sense to sell something that expensive. However, almost all creators have an audience that is engaged at varying levels. From the superfan to the new follower, creators of today can offer something for everyone.

Writer Li Jin recognized this and proposed a new model for creators, “100 True Fans”.

Jin states that creators of today can have a general audience who pays less while convincing a small group of true fans to pay more.

Tiraj has a significant following on social media. They market all of their offerings across channels. Tiraj has a website where they sell their artwork. Tiraj also has a Patreon page, wherein they offer perks for being a monthly patron. Patrons can pay anywhere from $5 a month to $25 a month. Finally, Tiraj offers a twice yearly course centered around expressionist painting. They sell the course for $600.

Since Tiraj has something for both their supportive followers and superfans, they are able to generate income from a larger audience overall.

Jin goes on to explain that a key aspect of the 100 true fans model is the ability to offer a product that solves pain points: Users are willing to pay more for something they perceive to be highly beneficial to themselves.

Lower cost offerings allow an audience to show their support, either through tips, donations or purchases. Meanwhile, higher-cost purchases are generally motivated by self-interest.

With this model in mind, creators of today can develop tiered offerings. This allows creators to sell their work at a mass-market price, while offering valuable, often educational, content at a higher price to a more exclusive audience.

How to Cultivate True Fans in Your Business

According to Li Jin’s theory of 100 true fans, creatorpreneurs already have access to the tools they need to engage their audience. But, let’s take a step back. When starting from scratch, how can a creator begin to cultivate true fans in their business?

1. Know Your Ideal Avatar

Superfans are those who connect with and buy from a business, artist, or creator the most. Often, it is the product, their personal connection, and a sense of community that turns someone from a passive follower into a true fan.

Therefore, entrepreneurs need to understand the ideal avatar for their products and offerings. By understanding who the perfect customer is, it’s easier to position messaging and develop new ideas with those people in mind.

Tim Ferris offers poignant advice on this matter: “your goal is to define the people that absolutely LOVE what you create.” But who are those people?

Creators should conduct research, speak with their current audience, and gain clarity on who these people truly are.

It’s best to avoid relying on demographics and caricatures. Instead, seek to understand why these people find the products and offerings valuable. The better a creator understands this, the easier it will be to continue creating highly valuable products for their ideal customer.

Fitness coach, Nagina Abdullah detailed how she built a six-figure coaching business utilizing this framework. Just six months after launching her website, she was able to generate $10,000 from an email list with only 500 subscribers.

Her personalized coaching packages cost around $5,000 — drastically reducing the number of true fans (only 20) required to breach $100,000. She cites her free “Breakthrough Sessions” that help people connect with her and get clear on their goals as a big part of this early success, which she has since built upon.

2. Focus Content Creation Around Superfans

Cultivate true fans by creating a content plan focused around superfan needs and wants. Knowing the audience that loves what they create, entrepreneurs can reverse engineer their content plan to attract similar audiences.

Blog writing is a great example of this: writers generally review high-volume keywords, formulate topic ideas, and create content to fulfill these findings. However, a blog writer that centers their superfans will first learn about pain points, then generates topic ideas, and do keyword research last to optimize for search engines.

Both approaches produce SEO-friendly content. However, the latter approach is likely to generate far greater conversion rates. This is because the articles themselves are designed to solve pain points for the reader, which allows the writer to build trust.

While not all content requires keyword research, this approach can be applied to topic ideation for social media, newsletters, landing pages, and more.

Musician Kinna Grannis did this naturally when she pivoted away from record labels and decided to make music directly for fans. With Patreon as her platform, Kinna created her own record label under the name KG Records.

She has built a community of over 1,300 patrons who donate $5, $10, or $50 a month in exchange for various perks. This has allowed her to avoid burnout, learn music production, and release songs she’s excited to share while making a full-time income directly from her fans.

3. Become a True Fan & Build Community

Creators know that putting content out into the world is only half of the equation. Especially when on social media, building community is often best achieved by becoming a fan of what others create.

Therefore, spend time sincerely engaging with the content others produce within relevant niches and the broader community. Become mutual fans with other creators and share their work.

This creates opportunities to form genuine connections, allowing entrepreneurs to truly learn about their audience’s pain points and how to best solve them. This also allows creators to step away from analytics and appreciate each relationship being built.

Yaro Starak grew his business by helping others. Yaro is a heart surgeon who blogs about personal growth and making money online. “That alone may or may not qualify as remarkable,” Yaro admits. What does, however, is the fact that Yaro uses the money his website generates to sponsor life-saving surgeries for children from under-privileged families who cannot afford it on their own.

He states that this is an act of following his heart. But doing so landed him a feature in Seth Godin’s marketing book Purple Cow. It also led to an interview in Fast Company magazine, as well as several features across newsletters and blogs. This, Yaro says, is how he was able to gain the all-important 1,000 true fans that have continued to support him.

4. Talk to Your Audience & Ask for Feedback

Another benefit of forming strong relationships with an audience is the ability to easily ask for their input or feedback. Creators are often worried about investing time into a product that fails. One way to avoid this potential trap is for creators to speak directly with their audience and ask them what offerings they are interested in and why.

Once a product has been released, creators can solicit feedback. The stronger the relationships, the more likely they are to be honest about what did and didn’t work for them. This feedback is priceless, as it allows the creator to adjust their offerings and create greater satisfaction for customers.

Not only does this level of engagement improve the entrepreneur's products, it makes users feel valued. It lets them know the creator is interested in more than just a fiscal exchange. Nothing will create a superfan faster than changing a product based on their feedback. This is exactly what Kevin Kelly meant when he said that the concept of 1,000 true fans requires direct relationships.

Sometimes those direct relationships are formed before a business is even built. With a history of working in tech, Ben Thompson writes a blog for people who want to understand its impact on society. Through unbiased analytical observations, Ben has attracted a wide range of readers, including tech executives from large tech companies, founders of the latest startups, venture capitalists, and investors.

An avid follower of the 1,000 true fan formula, he offers membership to exclusive content for $12 a month or $120 a year. This has allowed him to make a living from his blog while living in Taiwan.

5. Create New Products for Existing Customers

Existing customers are the most likely to buy new products. They are also the most likely to become true fans, if they aren’t already. By creating new products for this audience, creators are able to offer value to the audience that’s already shown its willingness to buy.

The key is to find ways to add more value to their life.

When customer’s trust products to solve pain points or catalyze joy, convincing them to purchase requires very little effort. That means it’s important to ensure old products are generating the promised results, while creating new products that deliver even more value.

By continuing to create value for this audience, creators nurture the relationships that produce the most profit in their business as well. This also aligns with the 80/20 rule of business, which suggests that 80 percent of revenue will be generated by 20 percent of an audience.

Being able to continually sell new products to the best customers creates opportunities for reliably successful product launches. This segment of an audience is also the most likely to promote new products to their audience, thereby spreading the word.

Ramit Sethi is a majorly successful entrepreneur who transparently shared the revenue generated by his 1,000 true fans. The results firmly validate the importance of creating new products that your superfans will love: Ramit’s top 1,000 customers spent an average of $8,600 on his products — having generally purchased 6 of the 18 products he’s offered.

Potentially more staggering, Ramit shared numbers from a previous launch and compared the number of repeat customers to new leads. From 170,000 prospects, Ramit made 619 sales. Yet from 10,000 past students, Ramit made 649 sales. This suggests that Ramit has successfully solved pain points for his superfans, creating trust and a loyal customer base.

1,000 Attainable Paths to Success

Many aspiring creators and entrepreneurs become overwhelmed by the amount of information there is to learn and the various details that require their attention along the way. The concept of 1,000 true fans was, and continues to be, a manifesto of, “you can do it; it’s possible to succeed.”

As creatures of negative bias, it’s all-too-easy to decide something is impossible. When what is truly needed is brave and consistent action toward a goal, however messy or imperfect progress may be.

This framework is meant to inspire and motivate creators (like you) to put their work out into the world and try — with the knowledge that success is far closer than they may think.

How to Make Your YouTube Videos More Profitable (Any Niche!)

2022-05-31T22:54:05Z

What if I told you that a YouTube video with 300,000 views can make significantly more than a video with 1,300,000 million views?

Shocking, but true.

When it comes to ad revenue from YouTube videos, all niches and topics are not created equal. The type of content you create on YouTube can determine whether you’re getting paid an average of $2 per 1000 views or upwards of $12.

The best topics for making money on YouTube probably won’t surprise you. But insight into these topics can help you craft more profitable videos within your own niche, whatever it may be.

For this article, we’re discussing Google AdSense revenue — as opposed to profit from sponsorships, affiliate marketing, and selling digital products.

While very few video creators rely solely on AdSense revenue, it provides a helpful picture of the amount of passive income a creator can expect to generate from YouTube.

Sponsorships are lucrative, but this source of income is only reliable when a creator is making content.

When that creator takes a break, those checks stop coming. But the income their videos generate from AdSense revenue continues to payout — providing income even years later for searchable, highly niche, or popular topics.

How to Make Money From YouTube

Once a YouTube creator has reached 1,000 subscribers or accumulated 4,000 watch hours within a 12-month time window, they are eligible for the YouTube Partner Program.

This allows the creator to place Google’s ads on their videos and receive ad revenue in exchange. The creator is paid at varying rates per 1,000 views — the CPM (Cost Per Mille).

Thing is, not all niches are created equal when it comes to maximizing the profitability of a YouTube video’s CPM. Educational content generally has higher CPMs, while gaming content and music hold a fraction of the profitability.

The True Value of a YouTube Channel

Unsurprisingly, the most profitable YouTube niches often focus on helping other people make money or teaching them to learn something new.

For many small business owners and side hustlers, a YouTube channel has the potential to be both a marketing channel and stream of revenue.

While this article focuses on the income from AdSense revenue, it is important to remember that the true value of a YouTube channel cannot be captured with this data.

A YouTube channel is one of the best ways to share your ideas and knowledge. Even with minimal AdShare revenue, creators can leverage their audience and promote their brand.

What Makes a YT Niche Profitable? High CPM VS. Most Views

There are two ways to determine the most profitable YouTube niches: consider the topics that garner the highest viewership, or consider the topics that cost the most for a company to display an advertisement (high CPM).

Neither approach is inherently superior. You will need to consider the competition and how to set yourself apart from the competition — whatever the niche.

What is true, however, is that advertisers quite literally place a higher value on the views from certain niches.

A great example of this is music. While “20% of the top 100 YouTube searches in the US are Music related,” the niche has an average CPM of just under $2 per 1000 views.

If you consider the way that users passively engage with music on the app, this makes a lot of sense. Meanwhile, the topic of how to make money? Not surprisingly, it has an average CPM of $13 per 1000 views.

This suggests that viewers watching videos about highly profitable topics are more likely to purchase products featured in the video. This is good for you too!

That same logic can be applied to the digital products you sell.

If companies with huge advertising budgets are competing to invest their dollars in your content to get results, you are also likely to get results when promoting your own products (granted they solve pain points).

The Most Profitable Niches & Topics on YouTube

We’re borrowing our CPM averages from Jack Cao, who reached out to various YouTubers within each category to compile this information that would otherwise be impossible to research.

Unfortunately, the information in each category doesn’t include the specific videos that produced the higher CPM. Instead, these numbers represent an average CPM for the categories.

It’s important to note that some videos make significantly more than $13 for 1000 views.

There are many factors that contribute to a video’s CPM, including the number of ads displayed, where the viewers are located, overall quality and family friendliness, and of course, the niche.

With Cao’s data compiled from various YouTube creators, here is the average profitability of each YouTube niche per 1000 views:

Make Money Online: $13.52
Social Media Marketing: $12.41
Finance & Investing: $12.25
Educational Videos: $9.89
Photography & Film Making: $7.31
Cars: $4.23
Lifestyle: $3.47
Fashion & Clothing: $3.13
Entertainment: $2.74
Cooking: $2.50
Tech & Gadgets: $2.39
Reviews & Reactions: $2.03
Bodybuilding & Fitness: $1.60
Music: $1.46
Video Games: $1.40
ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response): $0.29
Dance Cover: $0.035

That means, the same video with 300,000 views could make anywhere from $10.50 to $4,056, depending on the niche.

A Note on Monetized Playbacks vs. Video Views

Not all views on a video are monetized. This is for a few reasons:

Ad Blockers

Skipped ads

Premium subscriptions

Overall, this is simply something to monitor in your analytics and keep in mind when estimating your CPM based on a video’s views alone.

To view your RPM (Revenue per Mille): open YouTube Creator Studio, click on Analytics, then Ad Rates.

Other Factors That Affect YouTube Niche Profitability

Topic is not the only thing that affects how profitable a video can be. Although it is one of the biggest factors, there are a few more to consider:

The Number of Ads Displayed

The number of ads a video displays is often directly related to the length of the video. If a video is ten minutes long, it might display an ad at the beginning, the end, and at least one at the middle. While no creator wants to bombard their viewers with advertisements, it’s important to keep up with standard industry practices so as to not leave money on the table.

Aside from the bookend ads of the video, a creator should aim to display an ad about every 10-15 minutes of content.

While varying creators will choose to display more or less, this rhythm of ads is one viewers are accustomed to and therefore do not find to be too obtrusive.

Location of Viewership

Where the majority of your viewers are located will have a significant impact on your channel’s average CPM as well. YouTube has not shared the CPM for each country.

However, a random YouTube creator shared their inconsistent payouts by country with Digital Music News. While this is a sample size of one channel, the information reveals that Western countries with a high GDP (gross domestic product) generally payout the highest CPM.

Overall Quality & Family Friendliness

Quality is always going to be king. Even more so when you’re creating content for highly competitive niches and keywords. Luckily on YouTube, quality doesn’t necessarily mean using the fanciest camera and editing software.

This is especially true when the content you’re creating is educational in nature. Creating high quality content is first and foremost about the content. Are you answering the promised query? Have you considered all the angles and researched potential blind spots?

Similarly, family friendliness is an important part of making your content suitable to advertisers. Generally, an advertiser isn’t going to display ads on videos that would damage the reputation of the brand. Therefore, creating content with general family friendliness in mind is important for CPM. YouTube has a page that covers these guidelines.

Bringing It All Together

YouTube creator, Shelby Church discussed the topic of what YouTube pays creators with other YouTubers back in 2019. She spoke with Kevin David who makes content about ecommerce and making money online. He shared a video’s analytics from the prior 28 days:

In that month, the video received only 27,000 views — but those views generated $1,700 of revenue. That’s $63 CPM!

How is that possible?

Kevin’s video combines all of the factors that contribute to a high CPM:

The video’s topic is Shopify Tutorial for Beginners. It’s a step-by-step guide that walks the viewer through setting up their store.

The video is simple: a screen capture with voice-over. But the information is high-quality and educational.

It’s made for an audience generally expected to be based in the United States.

And, most significantly, it’s almost an hour long.

This is a long video designed to allow the viewer to follow along. The video’s title promises to deliver certain information and it does so in abundance.

Alongside the high quality information, what’s the main reason this video is highly profitable?

There are ads throughout the hour-long video and viewers are likely to watch most of them because it is a tutorial.

Creating longer videos simply to display more ads will hurt quality. But with this topic, the length is necessary and even appreciated by viewers.

The takeaway? If you can offer immense value on a topic that requires more time, don’t be afraid to make long-form videos.

How to Find Highly Profitable Topics for Your Channel

Companies pay a certain amount each time an advertisement is displayed on a video. This amount is determined partially by the keyword competition.

Keywords with higher competition (meaning other advertisers also want to show their ads on that video), cost the advertiser more to display an ad. Which means the video creator (you!) also receives more money.

Therefore, find YouTube topics with competitive and valuable advertising keywords to increase your video’s CPM.

Here’s how.

In order to determine what keywords to target with advertisements, companies use the Google Keyword Planner. This tool shows how much advertisers are paying for keywords.

When using the Keyword Planner, remember that advertisers are searching based on what they have to sell. Therefore, use the planner to find keywords that can be profitable and hone in on specific topics to cover therein.

In Google’s own words, “Try not to be too specific or general. For example, "meal delivery" is better than "meals for a food delivery business.”

When you visit the Keyword Planner for the first time, Google will ask you to confirm your billing location, timezone, and currency. These settings cannot be changed later.

Once you’re in the Keyword Planner, select Discover new keywords.

Here, you can enter topics you’ve brainstormed for potential future videos to evaluate their CPM potential.

Let’s compare topics from a few different categories.

Keep in mind: This is not the amount you would receive per ad displayed. This is simply what the advertiser might expect to pay when bidding on a spot.

Music

Topic: Best Midi Keyboards

Low: $0.18

High: $1.55

Ecommerce

Topic: Shopify for Beginners

Low: $2.50

High: $25.93

Cooking

Topic: Vegan Meal Prep

Low: $3.02

High: $8.95

How to Make Money

Topic: SEO Content Writing

Low: $4.30

High: $15.00

Tech & Gadgets

Topic: iPhone Case

Low: $0.38

High: $1.33

Should I Change My YouTube Channel’s Niche?

Probably not. If you have an abundance of passion and experience in a different niche that you want to explore, by all means create a new channel.

But do not try to make content in a profitable niche that isn’t a good fit for you.

Ultimately, AdSense revenue is not going to be the main source of income for any YouTube creator.

The most important thing is that you are able to consistently create content and monetize your skills in a joyful & useful way.

How to Make Your YouTube Niche More Profitable

Let’s say you want to increase and maximize your CPM for the niche that you already have. Let’s also assume that your content is already high-quality, displaying a good balance of ads, and family friendly.

How do you find topics within your niche that are more profitable than others?

A combination of using the Google Keyword Planner, as instructed above, and doing some SEO (search engine optimization) research to see what people are searching for will go a long way.

I’m going to use a YouTube channel that discusses creative writing as a niche example.

A quick search of “creative writing” on YouTube yields the following general topics:

Improve your creative writing

Creative writing exercises

How to write descriptively

Creative writing advice from Stephen King

How to show, not tell

There’s also a section labeled, People Also Search For. Related topics include:

Creativity

Academic writing

Journalism

Copywriting

Poetry

Depending on my own experience as a writer and YouTube creator, I can also dive into these other topics and explore what’s popular in those categories.

For even more in-depth information, you can explore these topics with a Google Search.

When you search for a query, the “People Also Ask” section will populate more questions as you click on others. This provides a wealth of related content people are looking for. Answerthepublic.com is another fun resource for discovery.

With a list of general topics, I can open the Google Keyword Planner.

When doing keyword research, consider the different angles from which the same topic might be posed. For example, I began my search with the two main results YouTube presented:

Improve Creative Writing

Competition: Low

Bid Range: $1.64 - $ 6.29

Creative Writing Exercises

Competition: Low

Bid Range: $1.40 - $4.33

But what if I framed this topic more broadly?

Better Writing

Competition: Medium

Bid Range: $1.05 - $7.49

How to Write Better

Competition: Low

Bid Range: $0.86 - $45.00

The Keyword Planner also provides suggestions for broadening my search; including: writing resources, writing course, better grammar, better communication, better literacy. Let’s search for “creative writing courses”.

Creative Writing Courses

Competition: Medium

Bid Range: $3.24 - $18.36

Look at that! We went a few levels into the research and found a topic with some serious profitability potential. Some potential video topics to create from this information would be:

Top 5 Online Creative Writing Courses (+ 3 Worst)

This Creative Writing Course Changed How I Approach the Craft

10 Things I Learned From XYZ Creative Writing Course

A Day in My Life: Taking an Online Creative Writing Course

Furthermore, there’s a good chance that some of the courses you feature have affiliate programs. Meaning, when your viewers buy the course, you will make a percentage of the profit.

Make sure you plug your own digital products too!

Even if you don’t have a writing course, viewers of this type of video will be looking for more information — which is a large part of why the CPM is high.

Note: Not all of your content has to be optimized for a high CPM. Rather, use these types of videos to buoy your other content, increase subscribers, and broaden your reach.

Leverage Your YouTube Channel To Generate the Most Profit

While this type of research can be dry, I hope it will be inspiring and motivating. Instead of plucking ideas from thin air or jumping on other trends, this method of evaluating topics allows you to determine the potential profitability of your content.

While not every piece of content needs to be optimized for profit, this research is likely to improve your content’s overall searchability across both Google and YouTube.

That additional traffic doesn’t just translate into more AdSense money. It also presents opportunities to build your community, offer unique digital products, and create multiple streams of sustainable revenue.

YouTube creators who want to make feature-length films or create valuable video projects the algorithm simply won’t give the platform it deserves: consider SendOwl. Secure video streaming — no downloading needed.

Customers purchase access and receive your high-quality video content directly and automatically. There’s no limit to what you can sell with SendOwl.

Watch the developer breakout video here

SendOwl App Featured in 2022 Stripe Sessions Keynote & Developer Breakout

2022-05-12T16:01:42Z

Stripe — the financial infrastructure platform for businesses — hosted its annual user conference Sessions today. This event is an opportunity for Stripe’s leaders to discuss the trends of the internet economy and showcase how Stripe is helping to shape the future.

This year, a big focus was on introducing the Stripe Apps Marketplace. The Stripe Apps Marketplace is designed to help users:

accelerate business growth while reducing busywork;
access essential tools without switching tabs or accounts;
simplify common workflows with information synced across apps.

SendOwl is delighted to announce the SendOwl Stripe app: a digital delivery platform built to help Stripe merchants streamline and scale their digital sales — featured in the Stripe Sessions keynote and Developer breakout! We are elated to have teamed up with Stripe to bring users this blissful integration. View the SendOwl app here.

“With SendOwl’s Stripe App, Stripe merchants can upload and link digital content, such as an online course or a PDF file, to a product in Stripe, and automatically deliver it to their buyer after checkout.”

SendOwl couldn’t be more excited to be one of the first apps in the marketplace, and we're excited for users to test it out. Which you can do starting today!

Try it free.

What Is the SendOwl Stripe App?

The SendOwl app is the digital delivery engine for business owners across the internet. Built for seamless integration with Stripe, the SendOwl app provides secure and automatic delivery of digital goods purchased through Stripe checkout.

The SendOwl app allows Stripe users to streamline and scale their digital goods delivery — all from within the Stripe dashboard.

For existing Stripe users, it's as simple as installing the SendOwl app from the Stripe Apps Marketplace and following four easy steps to get up and running.

Within the Stripe dashboard, SendOwl app users can view all the payments linked to their products. Or, drill into a specific subscription and manage a subscriber’s access.

For delivery downloads, SendOwl app users can set download restrictions, based on number of attempts or a time limit, and provide more download attempts.

After checkout, the buyer automatically receives an email with a secure link to download their digital goods. This download page includes a product image, name, and remaining download attempts.

Merchants will also be able to review insightful reports, like product metrics and delivered orders — all without ever leaving Stripe.

Developers: Integrate Digital Goods Delivery into Existing Applications

Stripe users don’t need to write a single line of code to sell through SendOwl.

But for developers, SendOwl has a REST API and provides webhooks for common events. This allows developers to integrate selling and delivering digital goods into existing applications.

Why is this a big deal?

Developers and makers who already have a custom system, such as a checkout, that uses Stripe can now integrate SendOwl webhooks. SendOwl webhooks send information to your app when a SendOwl event is triggered, such as when a digital good is purchased.

But SendOwl’s webhooks are useful beyond just orders completed — trigger a webhook when a refund is issued, when an order triggers fraud review, and much more.

For companies and developers that want to build solutions for the creator economy or around digital commerce, the SendOwl app’s REST API is an out-of-the-box framework.

Instead of spending months building a scalable solution from scratch, SendOwl’s API makes it possible to build on top of the solution you’re already using with Stripe!

Want to learn more about developing with SendOwl? View our developer help docs.

The SendOwl App is Available Now!

The SendOwl Stripe app — the digital delivery engine for the internet economy — is available to install from the Stripe App Marketplace. Try it free today.

We’re excited for users and developers alike to take full advantage of the SendOwl app through the Stripe dashboard. For questions and inquiries, please contact stripesupport@sendowl.com.

Why Digital Products Fail + 5 Tips for Success

2022-05-18T17:20:15Z

Photo credit: Prateek Katyal

I speak with a new group of digital business owners every week. In an effort to understand the landscape of the creator economy and entrepreneur pain points, I ask about their digital business and the products that make them money.

Time and again I hear the same concern:

“I’m worried a new product will fail after I’ve invested my time and knowledge into creating it.”

It’s a fear that’s not unfounded: Harvard Business School estimates that 95 percent of the 30,000 new products introduced each year fail (either physical or digital).

So, why do some products succeed where others fail?

We’ve all seen ads for some flashy new product with a million-dollar marketing campaign that users never adopt; meanwhile, a competing product overtakes the market by word-of-mouth.

While marketing, user experience, and sound pricing are all factors of a successful product — none of these factors alone will assure a product’s success.

More often than not, a digital product fails because no one needs or wants it.

For creatives and entrepreneurs, it can be difficult to pivot after product failure — especially when operating from biased or outdated views of an industry or topic.

Failure is common, even necessary, for success.

Even so, it’s helpful to recognize that you’re not alone. The greatest writers, inventors, scholars, and political figures throughout history have remarked on the importance of failure:

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” - Winston Churchill

While shying away from potential failure is a natural human impulse, people who can fail and try again will always be more successful than those who do not persist.

If you don't succeed at first, there's no need for the F word (Failure). Pick yourself up and try, try again. - Richard Branson

The Biggest Reason Most Digital Products Fail

Within every niche or topic, there are winning solutions and unresolved problems. The most successful products transform user experience and shift the landscape of its industry.

A standout example is the iPhone. Famously not the first internet phone, the iPhone solved the greatest pain points users experienced with earlier versions of mobile devices, especially those designed to be internet-capable.

Furthermore, Steve Jobs was a wizard at marketing, positioning not only the brand’s message but the entire company culture behind a central ‘why’. His big vision of what Apple products can do for users created the avid fan culture Apple products have today.

Digital products fail when they don’t solve a pain point or catalyze joy.

In general, Apple is still able to produce products (physical and digital) that both solve major pain points and, importantly, catalyze joy. A successful product must do one or the other. A wildly successful product does both.

So, what factors lend to a successful digital product?

5 Tips for Successful Digital Products

A successful business receives profit in exchange for providing value in the form of products and services to its customers. A solid question to ask when creating a product is, “what transformation am I guiding my customers through?”

Whether you are developing a new product or trying to understand why a previous one failed, the following factors will help you to create a successful digital product.

1. Know Your Customer’s Needs & Wants

Similar articles have more formally stated this concept as, “a lack of independent and unbiased research into the market and target audience.” How to best go about doing this research is debatable, however. Simply asking customers what they want will not create results.

Instead, it is the job of the entrepreneur to envision a solution greater than the one a customer can envision for themselves.

To do this, there must first be a thorough understanding of the customer’s needs and wants. Whatever the niche or industry, there are communities of consumers who congregate online and offline. While it is important to speak with your customers directly and receive feedback, it is equally as important to step into their shoes.

Often a product is most successful when the creator has made it to solve their own pain point — it just so happens that it was a widely shared point of pain.

The same is true for products that catalyze joy. Dolly Parton wrote Jolene and I Will Always Love You on the same day (or at least the same period of time).

While that is remarkable, it also makes perfect sense to the creative who understands the relationship between emotional catharsis and the flow state.

Dolly Parton captured something universal to the human experience, and the songs’ legendary status stand as proof of that.

2. Focus on User Experience (Every Step of the Way)

“When you’re trying to stand out from the crowd online, one of the best ways to do so is by being clear, concise, and accessible to your target audience.”

There are many facets to creating an optimal user experience:

There is the experience of using the digital product — whether this is software, an ebook, email course, video stream, printable, or anything else. This will often determine whether a customer will continue to buy the product (subscription) or future products.

However, before using the product, the customer had to discover it. The brand messaging and marketing funnel that led them to purchase the product is also part of the user experience. A good experience here will add credibility to the product, while a bad experience will hurt conversions.

Finally, you must also consider the customer service experience, both pre-purchase and post-purchase. How easy is it for them to reach out when they have an issue? How quickly and accurately do you respond? This is likely the first time your customer is interacting with a person from the business one-on-one, which means this experience is pivotal to their overall perception. A phenomenal experience sets the stage for them becoming your biggest cheerleader.

How do you ensure customers have a positive experience every step of the way?

Having integrity as a business and putting the customer’s best interests first is the foundation of a positive customer experience. It’s also helpful to create messaging that reflects the values of the people behind the company. Use reliable tools to create, market, and deliver your digital products, and make customer support easily accessible.

3. Does the Product Create Transformation?

A beautiful piece of music transforms its listener. Useful software transforms the workflow of its user. An insightful ebook transforms its reader’s perspective of a topic.

Whatever you are creating, in whatever field you are creating it, there is a transformation you are guiding the customer through with your product.

A product may technically do what it was designed to accomplish, but if it does not create the transformation promised, it will not be meaningful to the customer.

To ensure your product is doing all it can to facilitate transformation, it’s important to step into your customers' shoes. It’s also wise to share your product with a small group for free in exchange for their honest feedback. This will provide you with an opportunity to address unforeseen issues and discover blindspots.

It may be that you find your product’s scope is too broad and that the transformation you’re trying to achieve requires a more narrow scope. You may find that you’re trying to stuff too much information into one course, or module of a larger course. It may be as simple as learning that your customers would hugely benefit from certain material, which you can distribute as a bonus.

It can be difficult to understand why a product fails.

When you are certain that customers are satisfied with the transformation your product guides them through, then you can focus on improving other aspects — like email marketing, sales conversions, brand awareness, and more.

4. Define Your Value Propositions

We briefly touched on the idea of selling ‘why’, as opposed to explaining ‘what’.

Of course, potential customers need to understand a product’s purpose. But that understanding must be sold to the customer with value propositions.

The benefits of an item tells the customer what it does or what it is used for. But the value proposition highlights the experience of using the product. In other words:

Benefits tell a customer about the transformation they will undergo.

Value propositions express how they will feel after the transformation.

Instead of selling a product, you’re selling the experience of that product. Whether it’s a course that will teach you how to read music or an ebook on bird-watching:

The value propositions for your digital product provides the customer with a vision of their life with your product in it.

Let’s use a fitness course as an example.

The benefit of a fitness course is that it helps customers get into shape and have a healthier lifestyle. The value proposition?

Your mind still feels 25. Why can’t your body too?

Whether the fitness course is able to deliver on such a high value proposition is another story.

Your value propositions elicit feelings that your digital product must be able to deliver on.

There is a business owner I adore who is fantastic at getting me excited about her products. So much so that I bought three before I realized they never truly help me transform in the way her marketing promises. Now, no matter how fantastic her value propositions — I do not trust them.

This highlights the importance of balancing compelling marketing with a deliverable product.

5. Failure to Create a Launch Plan

There are many approaches to launching a new product. But the worst thing you can do is fail to create a launch at all — even if you have a small audience.

A launch will allow you to create awareness and hype about the product. Customers are able to anticipate its arrival and build a story in their minds about the experience of using it.

Your three-ring circus is the main event, but you still need to throw a carnival. Put simply, your launch is the process of introducing customers to your new digital product.

At minimum, this should involve promotion across your marketing channels. You might also consider paid advertising and partnerships with influencers.

More even than creating new customers, your launch should focus on generating excitement and wow-factor among your current customers. They are the most likely to buy your new product and spread news word-of-mouth.

Product launches are fantastic opportunities to engage with your customers as a community.

While the goal is sales, most creators and entrepreneurs want to make a positive impact through what they create. Your product launch gives you the opportunity to discuss everything that led you to this point, why you took the journey, and what you hope it will do for your customers.

Some may want to avoid a launch so as to not appear sales-sy. But creating something from passion and a desire to inspire change is full of heart. All you have to do is share it.

Creating Digital Products Designed for Success

Business owners, especially solopreneurs, know that there is always more to learn. Other factors that affect a product’s success include market timing, pricing, quality, competition, and much more.

If you have passion and a strong feeling, test it out!

Sell the product before you create it. Or create it, sell it, and regularly update it until it’s just right. You can create five different products and see what sticks. The choice is yours.

Focus on your niche.

Get to know your customers.

Treat failure as redirection.

And give yourself grace through every learning curve and wave of self-doubt.

The more I talk to business owners, the more I learn that no two journeys are exactly the same. Cliche but true. In fact, it is each entrepreneurs’ unique journey that makes them the ideal person to create their digital product.

So, what’s your story? And how can it be of service to someone else? Start there. Follow these guidelines, and find out what works.

Speaking with business owners has helped me feel less pressure to be perfect as I stumble from one failure to the next with tremendous enthusiasm.

I hope this article has done the same for you.

The Best Time to Post on TikTok (According to Data!) 2022

2022-05-10T17:23:31Z

Tiktok is one of the most popular social media platforms in 2022. Various small businesses, content creators, and brands use TikTok to promote their skills and products. With over one billion monthly active users, TikTok offers huge potential for reaching an audience.

TikTok has become known as a platform where smaller creators can grow large followings. Perhaps one way this is accomplished is the fact that past video success does not influence current promotion. In other words, each video is evaluated by the algorithm individually, regardless of the following a creator has amassed.

That being said, the best time to post on TikTok will still largely depend on when your following is active on the platform. If current followers engage with new content, it will receive an overall boost and be pushed out to a wider audience.

For our article, we will evaluate general TikTok user data and show you how to view when your followers are active. That way, you can compare the data to determine the best time to post on TikTok to engage with your audience.

What is the Best Time to Post on TikTok (2022)

The short and sweet answer: there’s no best time to post to TikTok.

Why?

Every audience is different.

Every community will have different internet habits. Instead, let’s review the data!

Influencer Marketing Hub analyzed 100,000 posts on the platform. Though a small sample size, this is the most data-backed information. It should allow you to make an informed decision as to the best time to post on TikTok:

The Best Time to Post on TikTok (Eastern Time)

Monday 6 AM, 10 AM, 10 PM

Tuesday 2 AM, 4 AM, 9 AM

Wednesday 7 AM, 8 AM, 11 PM

Thursday 9 AM, 12 AM, 7 PM

Friday 5 AM, 1 PM, 3 PM

Saturday 11 AM, 7 PM, 8 PM

Sunday 7 AM, 8 AM, 4 PM

The best days to post on TikTok are in bold above. The best time to post on TikTok isn’t the same for all one billion active monthly users. Reaching the audience you already have is one of the prime ways to boost initial engagement and increase the potential of virality.

What is the Best Time to Post for You — According to TikTok!

How to view when your followers are most active on the platform.

With a TikTok Business account, you can view the times and days when your followers on TikTok are the most active. The data from TikTok is personalized to you, in that it only considers when the people who already follow you will be online.

This is important because when your current followers engage with new content, it is more likely to reach a wider audience. To view this information, you need to switch to a Business account; here’s how:

Open the TikTok app.

From your Profile, tap the Menu (stacked horizontal lines) in the upper right corner.

Tap Settings and privacy.

Tap Manage Account.

Under Account Control, tap Switch to Business Account.

You will receive a welcome screen that highlights the features of a Business account. The app will then prompt you to choose a category for your business account.

That’s it!

You now have a Business TikTok account. From your profile, open the Menu and tap Business suite to access Analytics.

This menu also includes the ability to Promote your content through paid advertising, alter Message settings, and view the Business Creative Hub — a resource of trending content and helpful information for improving your videos.

So, what now?

TikTok organizes Analytics into four categories: Overview, Content, Followers, and LIVE (which has its own LIVE Center that you’re prompted to view).

Note: At the bottom of the Analytics page, TikTok recommends viewing analytics on your computer for a better experience.

For our purposes, we’re going to view the Followers tab, with specific emphasis on Follower activity:

The app displays a graph (by Hours or Days) that shows when your followers are most active.

Compare this information with the data from the 100,000 user sample size above. Do you notice any sweet spots?

Choose a few times you will post.

Consistently post at that time for a month. Then, use your Business account to view the data under Content.

Be sure to consider any outlining factors — like changes in your content, partnerships that accelerated growth, videos that hopped on a trend.

Based on what you find, determine whether or not posting at a certain time increased engagement. Are you able to find a discernible difference in engagement between the times you chose?

While it’s important to consider views, likes, shares, and comments, you can tap on each video to view more in-depth information as well. This includes how many people watched the full video, average watch time, traffic sources, and more.

How Often Should I Post to TikTik?

TikTok is about sharing life in the moment. It borrows the quick, authentic nature of Snapchat and pairs it with the flashy, audience-building features of Instagram.

Furthermore, the algorithm rewards consistency: Tiktok recommends posting 1-4 times a day, with a minimum of one per day generally recommended.

Holy batman! If that feels like way too much, consider the following:

Take the pressure off perfectionism. Unlike other social media platforms that encourage curated perspectives of life, TikTik is personable and focused on authenticity.

Create sustainable goals. Post one TikTok a day for two months. If you’re able to post every single day, choose two days a week that you’ll post twice. Do that for another month. The key is to create sustainable goals that allow you to follow-through consistently — even if you post less than the recommended amount.

TikTok does not need to be a large time investment. Consider your business and the various activities you perform within it. What can you feature that you’re already doing? What aspects of your skills and passions easily translate to TikTok?

5 Tips for Increasing TikTok Engagement

As with all social media platforms, understanding the algorithm is helpful when increasing your engagement. TikTok outlined its approach in a blog post. Here’s the TLDR:

Engagement is king. The more likes, comments, shares, and re-watches your video receives, the more the algorithm will promote it to relevant audiences.

Subject matter. The algorithm is an expert at dividing videos into categories. This allows the platform to push content out to the people it feels will like your content. The platform uses hashtags, audio, effects, and more to determine what the video is about.

Location and language. The app will use your location and language to determine the audience that will likely be interested in the content.

As previously mentioned, two factors that do not influence the algorithm are past success and follower count. With this understanding, let’s discuss five ways to increase your TikTok engagement:

Find Trends & Use Popular Audio

The highest leverage trends will be those relevant to your industry or community. The “Discover” page is ripe with popular trends on the platform. But when you find niche trends or use a global trend to highlight your niche, there is potential to reach a broader audience than if you had delivered the same information without following the trend.

Certain songs and audio clips are the basis for many trends. While the videos themselves have little in common, the audio that connects them is data to the algorithm. This means the platform will push out videos that use popular audio to those users who have shown that they enjoy the videos using it.

Use Analytics to Learn What Works (& Doesn’t)

A TikTok Business account allows you to view highly specific analytics. Aside from likes, comments, and shares, some of the most helpful stats for improving engagement are Average Watch Time and Watch full video.

There is also a section that shows you where video traffic came from (Video views by section). This is helpful for measuring whether the success of a video was able to reach beyond your current audience.

Post Consistently (& Maintain Quality)

TikTok wants both. Without becoming a hamster on a wheel, it’s important to post engaging content consistently. Trust me, I know this is easier said than done. Here’s three tips:

Avoid perfectionism. Allow each new video to be a learning experience.

Research your audience and niche. This will give you a clearer understanding of what topics are interesting to them.

Create a content calendar. This will allow you to make multiple videos in one day that are intended to be released throughout the week.

Hone Your Niche & Find Your Community

There are thousands of communities on TikTok; such as

Crafts

Plants

Traveling

Productivity

Finances

Food & Cooking

Psychology

Music genres like rap or jazz

Writing

Dance

Find your community and participate. Use TikTok Duets to interact with other users’ content. Follow accounts you’re inspired by and leave sincere comments regularly.

Everyone is trying to be seen on social media. Spend time seeing and appreciating what other people in your community are creating. Not only will it fuel your inspiration and give you ideas for content, it will allow you to build connections with other creators.

Encourage Audience Interaction (Ask Questions, Call to Action)

Highly watchable content is engaging — sometimes artificially, through the use of sounds, transitions, stickers, text, and more. Asking questions or including calls to action add variety to a video — which is likely to increase the number of people who watch the full video.

Inventive ways that ask the audience to participate will almost always yield more comments than simply sharing the video. For example, a craftsperson might create a video that shows their audience how to do something. Within the video, they could encourage the audience to Duet the video with their process and results.

Alternatively, an artist who creates realistic portraits may include a question, “Who should I draw next?” They might use the Text-to-Speech feature or include a voice-over to do so.

It’s important the questions are relevant and the interactions genuine. As a creator, this is not only a great way to create engagement — it’s how you become part of the community.

The Best Time to Post on TikTok is Relative

TikTok is a light-hearted platform that showcases a vast array of incredible humans doing amazing things. Losing sight of that and your contribution to it is the fastest way to become frustrated and disheartened.

The more you can put attention on building community, the more rewarding your exchanges will be — even when the goal is to build a large following.

While posting at the best time on TikTok isn’t an engagement guarantee, the data you collect allows you to create a strategy, test it, and learn from the results.

Social media algorithms will always be a shifting mystery. That’s why it’s important to extend your brand beyond any one platform. Otherwise, your brand, and potentially livelihood, becomes dependent on a company that is out of your control.

Consider monetizing your creative expertise by selling digital products. SendOwl has helped thousands of creators become financially profitable. Start your 30-day trial now.

Creator sponsorship use guide

SendOwl to Sponsor Creator Economy Expo (CEX)

2022-04-15T21:14:32Z

SendOwl is excited to announce our sponsorship of the first annual Creator Economy Expo (CEX), an event by creators, for creators! Join us alongside hundreds of financially successful content creators May 2-4 in Phoenix at the Arizona Grand Resort.

CEX is the first conference that centers on content creators, solopreneurs, and side hustlers whose passions fuel the digital economy — the fastest growing industry for small businesses.

Founded by industry veterans Joe Pulizzi (Content Marketing Institute and Tilt), and Brian Clark (Copyblogger and Unemployable). CEX brings the far-reaching community of content creators together for a stellar three-day event. It’s also an opportunity to mingle and learn from highly successful entrepreneurs in the digital economy. Guest speakers include:

YouTube success Roberto Blake
Copyblogger founder Brian Clark
New York Times best-seller Dan Pink
TikTok/Twitch star Leesh Capeesh
Media and writer superstar Ann Handley
Instagram phenom Wally Koval (Accidentally Wes Anderson)
Top business podcaster Jordan Harbinger
$100 Startup author Chris Guillebeau
Web3 expert Jeremiah Owyang
And nearly 40 other content entrepreneurs

The mission of the Creator Economy Expo is to help creators build profitable digital businesses, without relying on unpredictable platforms. They encourage creators to take control and become financially independent.

This is a hybrid event (available both in-person and video) whose speakers will share priceless first-hand knowledge on how to:

Build an audience
Drive revenue
Develop innovative operations
Prepare for Web3

Those who are unable to attend in person will be able to purchase video recordings of the discussions about two weeks after the event. Video recordings are included with all ticket purchases at no additional charge.

The event is also selling 100 NFT tickets, coined Never Ending Tickets, which buy access to all future CEX events, as well as VIP access to event parties.

“Unlike other events that cater to the big Silicon Valley platforms and ‘unicorn’ startups, CEX is for the creators themselves,” says CEX co-founder Brian Clark. “And those creators will come away understanding that they matter most.”

The team at SendOwl is looking forward to connecting with world-class content creators. From youtubers and newsletter gurus to freelancers and digital nomads, CEX is sure to be a treasure trove of value for digital entrepreneurs. Keep an eye on @sendowlhq for live updates during the event.

How to Create a Shoppable One-Pager That is Perfect for Your Link in Bio

2022-03-30T20:09:45Z

Unless you have a dedicated website or link aggregator, it can be challenging to sell multiple products on social channels like Instagram or TikTok without having to constantly change the link in your bio.

So how can you use SendOwl to showcase groupings of products (or all of them) with one simple link?

Get creative with the product sales page.

The SendOwl product sales page was originally designed to help users showcase more information about their digital product alongside easy checkout buttons. However, as so many features in SendOwl are, the sales page is flexible enough to allow you to turn a bundled product into a simple one-pager. All you need is a bit of copy-and-paste HTML magic, and boom, you have a link that lists multiple products that can be purchased individually or all at once. No coding required.

Here are 5 easy steps to getting it done.

Step 1: Add products

If you already have products configured, skip to Step 2.

Before you can create a bundle of all your digital products, you must first create them individually, setting the titles, prices and descriptions. Detailed instructions on adding digital products here.

Why is this important? In the following steps, you’ll be adding these products to your bundle by copying these product links.

Step 2: Copy product links

For each product you are including on your link in bio sales page, we recommend creating a list of product links ahead of time, as you will be using them to insert into HTML later.

Go to Products.
Select the individual product you want to use.
Scroll to the bottom of the page, and click on View Button Code.
Under Sell with Payment Links, click “Copy link” next to “Use this link to send customers directly to your payment page.”
Paste the links into a separate document for later use.

Step 3: Add a bundle

Creating a bundled product in SendOwl gives creators the ability to offer multiple products at a discounted rate by aggregating existing, individual products into one bundle. When users make a purchase, links, or files are delivered for all products in the bundle.

In this particular case, we are using the Bundle Sales Page to create a one-pager that not only includes the bundle purchase, but also links to purchase products individually.

From your Dashboard, go to Products > Bundle.
Enter a Bundle Name (visible to the end-user).
Set the Price that represents the purchase of all products included in the bundle (required). And don’t forget, everyone loves a good deal, so consider setting the price at a discounted rate to encourage customers to make the leap.
Select the applicable products that you want to showcase on your one-pager from the drop-down list.
Click Create Bundle.

Step 4: Configure the bundle product sales detail page

While viewing the bundle you just created, click on “Add a product image, description, and summary points.” under the Sales Page section.
You can add an image, but skip the Summary Points.
Under the Description, add HTML list code by copying and pasting the following example. It should include all of the relevant products in your bundle.

Follow a link below to purchase individual guides, or click "Buy Now" to purchase all of our guides at a discounted price.

<ul>
<li><a href=”YOUR SENDOWL PRODUCT LINK”>Owls of North America - $9.00</a></li>
<li><a href=”YOUR SENDOWL PRODUCT LINK”>Guide to British Owls - $9.00</a></li>
<li><a href=”YOUR SENDOWL PRODUCT LINK”>Owl Identification Chart - $4.00</a></li>
<li><a href=”YOUR SENDOWL PRODUCT LINK”>Owl Field Guide - $7.00</a></li>
<li><a href=”YOUR SENDOWL PRODUCT LINK”>Owl Safari Guide - $7.00</a></li>
</ul>

Each product in the example above is represented with an opening <li> tag and a closing </li> tag. If you want to remove a product from this example list (e.g. you’re only using 4 instead of 5), you can delete the entire <li> line. Always keep the opening and closing <ul> tags.

Update the YOUR SENDOWL PRODUCT LINK with the product specific payment links from Step 2.
Update the product title and pricing (e.g. Owls of North American - $9.00). Be sure the price you enter is the same as your product in SendOwl.
Once your links, titles, and prices have been updated and pasted into the Description box, Save your work.

Step 5: Grab your link and share

Navigate back to the bundled product you created.
Click the View Button Code link at the bottom of the Product Settings page.
Under Payment Links, click Copy Link next to the field labeled “Use this link to send customers to your product sales page.”
Add the link to your Instagram or TikTok bio (or anywhere you can paste a link on the Internet).

Voila! Instant one-stop-shop landing page for all your products.

Final thoughts

There are many options available to create these one-pagers (or link in bio). However, with SendOwl, you get the full checkout and digital delivery experience most of these other services don’t have, making setup easy for you and purchasing easy for your customers — winning!

Interested in learning more? Explore SendOwl features to discover how you can sell quickly and scale efficiently. Prefer to see for yourself? Give SendOwl a try free for 30 days. No credit card required.

Happy selling!

Klarna & installment plans

2021-12-22T18:35:31Z

One of the most common questions merchants ask is how to offer installment or payment plans to their buyers.

Traditionally, the answer has been to use the flexibility of our subscription-based products and limit the number of payments. However, while that still offers amazing benefits to both the merchant and the buyer, we felt there was a better solution.

Enter Klarna!

We are very excited to be able to offer Klarna as a payment method. Klarna is a payment method that can offer one or more of the following payment options:

Pay now. This is an instant payment but through the buyer's Klarna account (similar to how a buyer can use PayPal to pay for their purchase).
Buy now, pay later. This is where the buyer receives their product now but pays at a later date (e.g. in 30 days).
Pay in X. This is an interest-free payment plan where the buyer can opt to pay for the item in 3 or 4 installments.
Financing. In some countries, financing can also be an option for the buyer to purchase your product.

The purchase options Klarna displays to the buyer will depend on both your location, as the merchant, and the buyer’s location.

For example, if you and your buyer are based in the US, then Klarna can offer an installment plan with 4 interest-free payments.

Or another example, if you are both based in the UK, then they may also be offered a ‘Buy now, pay later’ option where the buyer receives their download links straight away but pays at a later date.

High priced products

An installment plan is perfect for higher-priced products such as online courses or coaching services which can easily become hundreds of dollars.

Being able to offer a simple and robust installment plan opens up your products to a whole new market.

Payments

Not only does Klarna offer payment options that increase your market reach, but they also handle every aspect of the buyer’s payment.

The result is you don’t need to worry about collecting the buyer’s payments or ensuring they complete their installment plan. Klarna does that for you.

You, as the merchant, receive payment in full immediately on completion of the checkout. Klarna then deals directly with the buyer to collect payments on the agreed schedule.

More sales and less worry! We think that’s a win for any seller.

Support

As you’ve come to expect, our help articles take you step-by-step through any process, and integrating Klarna through your Stripe account is no different:

Adding Klarna via Stripe

If you have any questions or feedback, or just want to say Happy Holidays, we’d love to hear from you!

The new SendOwl dashboard!

2021-12-01T14:56:48Z

We’ve got some big news to share that we think you’ll love. It’s been a long time coming, but we wanted to do our best to get it right for you all!

December 1st, 2021 is (or was, if you are reading this later) a big day for SendOwl. Our new dashboard is now 100% public. It’s an entirely new, intuitive design that makes it easier than ever to use our existing features and functionality; but, it’s also meant to serve as a great foundation for all the amazing things we have planned for 2022 and beyond. And before going deeper, a big thank you to our beta testers and our engineering team - this work is the result of months of hard work and feedback.

First Impressions

When you first log into the new SendOwl dashboard, you’ll immediately notice the upgrade. We’ve recast almost every detail to help make your workflows easier.

For example, adding products is quicker and easier than ever with fewer clicks and simpler steps...

And, as another example, the settings page is laid out more logically with everything where you would expect it to be...

And that’s just a few of the changes. Log in, click around, and you’ll find that every page is better, simpler, and more intuitive.

Mobile Friendly

Maybe the biggest change? The dashboard is now 100% mobile responsive. We’ve helped our merchants deliver over 1.8 billion USD of digital goods, and we think this change will help us significantly accelerate the next few billion dollars of digital goods sales by enabling our users to take SendOwl in their pocket anywhere in the world.

Help and support

As always, we’ve got your back when it comes to setting up your SendOwl account and selling your digital goods. Our extensive self-serve help site has been updated to show the new dashboard so if you do need a helping hand to set up your products and get selling, that’s the first place to start:

Sendowl help site

We’re really excited about this step forward and what it means for all of you who make our jobs possible. We know there are still areas we can simplify or improve, and we will continue to roll out upgrades in the months ahead. If you have any feedback, no matter how small you think it might be, please hit us up at support@sendowl.com. We review all requests and value your feedback greatly!

And we’re looking forward to shipping more things soon on top of this big upgrade. Sales tax automation, deeper external app integration, and advanced file security are already in the works.

A final note, if you love SendOwl, we’d greatly appreciate your referrals - if you do refer someone, you'll get 20% of every SaaS payment they make to SendOwl. Read about it here.

Cheers, SendOwl.

Creator Sponsorship (Patreon alternative)

2021-10-13T14:25:47Z

Being a creator can be a tough gig. Constantly generating new content for your audience and keeping them engaged is a full-time job. The challenge is that until recently it didn't pay like one!

But times change and creator sponsorship is a legitimate, predictable, and realistic way of generating revenue. If you are a creator struggling to monetize your passion, then read on!

Neatly packaged

As a creator, the content you create can't always be neatly packaged and sold as an ebook or other digital file.

Perhaps you create videos on YouTube, produce podcasts, paint, draw, sew, or simply give joy and hope to others through your art.

When you, and your creativity, can't be packaged into traditional formats or commerce, it can be difficult to monetize your content. That's where creator sponsorship comes in.

Creator sponsorship

Creator sponsorship is a legitimate, predictable, and realistic way of generating revenue. It's where your audience supports your efforts. It's where they show their appreciation and support for the joy your art brings them.

It could be a one-time payment to encourage you. Or a recurring payment to help you build up that legitimate income stream.

At SendOwl, we've made it as simple as possible for you to set up different ways for your audience to sponsor your work. We also believe you should get 100% of your contributions instead of a middle man taking a cut of your money!

Guide

To help you create your first sponsorship level, we created a guide that takes you through the process of setting up your SendOwl account, integrating your payment gateways (so you can get paid), and creating your sponsorship levels where you receive 100% of your sponsors' contributions:

We can’t wait to see how you use SendOwl to help support your creativity and, as always, if you have any thoughts or feedback, let us know!

Cheers, SendOwl.

Sell on Social Media!

2021-09-13T19:04:47Z

If you’re a creator that lives on Social Media, we’ve made it easier than ever for you to make money by selling directly to your followers (and their viral networks) on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Youtube, or anywhere you can paste a link on the internet.

Simple

In recent months, more and more creators have been looking for super simple ways to sell on Social, so we dug in and made some changes to your SendOwl dashboard to enable payment link selling of your digital products, services, subscriptions, memberships, and more.

Quick

In a matter of a few minutes, you can:

Login or create a SendOwl account
Upload your product, service, subscription, or membership (anything)
Paste your payment link on Social Media (or anywhere on the internet) for all your followers to see and amplify

Then your followers can buy, like, comment, and share your product. And you can watch sales come in and get paid!

Monetize your passion

We could not be more excited to roll out these changes to enable more ways for more creators to sell and monetize their passions. We can’t wait to see what you all will do with SendOwl.

Questions? Feedback? Product requests? Hit us up at support@sendowl.com. We review all requests and value your feedback greatly.

24/7 self serve support site

Learn the Basics of Marketing and Start Selling More Digital Products Today

2014-06-02T00:00:00Z

In this blog post we'll have a look at the basics of how to market your product. The main thing to remember though is to go for it: seriously. You're not a snake oil salesman set on alienating friends and strangers. You're making people aware of a product or service that they really want, but just hadn't heard about – until now.

Generate buzz

If you launch your product 'cold' - that is, without any buzz – then it will be a bit more of an uphill struggle for you to get people interested. Instead, even when you are still working on your book, or video game, or set of crochet patterns, start building your community. You don't even need to mention your product or service – just position yourself as someone who is interested and enthusiastic about an area connected to your product, and willing to talk about it in an accessible way. So if you are planning on writing an amusing book about your dog (like Marley and Me) get involved with one of the breed forums online and start writing snippets about your dog's life. You'll soon get a following if you are entertaining and enthusiastic about what you (or your dog!) does.

Build a community

Guess what? You probably already have a community. If you're a fitness guru and are launching a book aimed at this demographic then you're in touch with potential customers on a weekly basis, whether you are at the gym, contributing to a fitness forum, Facebook group, industry website, LinkedIn network for professional trainers, or taking part in a club event. All you need to do is expand this network in a strategic manner. Get talking to more people at the gym and follow them on social meda. Contribute some discussion posts on Facebook or use it to sound out a few ideas. See what the potential is for advertising at your local cycling or running club. Don't feel that you 'just' have to build a community online. Giving talks is a great way to grow interest in what you're doing and to position yourself as the 'go to' person on a particular subject. The most important thing at an early stage though is to go and meet your customers on their own ground, whether that is at crochet meetups, on Twitter or Hacker News, or at a conference. It's much harder to get them to come to you.

Create a compelling brand

You can start selling with just a Facebook page. However, a website gives you greater reach and with options like WordPress, SquareSpace, Wix and Weebly around you no longer absolutely have to employ a design agency (or your overworked techhie brother or sister) to help you out. Consider at this stage investing in good design and copy – you'll feel heartbroken if you manage to get people to your website only for them to bounce off because it is not user friendly, the copy is confusing or it looks terrible on mobile. To get a better idea about why user-friendly design and carefully crafted web copy are important you could dip into: Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug and Letting Go of the Words by Janice (Ginny) Redish.

Get people's emails

If you want to do a 'hot' launch then the dream is to have an email list of people interested in your product before you even ship your product. Then you can fire off an email and – kerching! – you get some sales. One way to reach this launch nirvana is to offer people something in exchange for their email as you build up to your launch. Perhaps you can give away a sample chapter of your book or a special effect, or even offer people a chance to have a character in a video game named after them?

Talk to your customers

Take every opportunity in the early stages – or at any stage really – to chat to customers to see what they like about your product, what they don't and what they think of your marketing tactics. It's easy to assume that you know what customers need – but you could be wrong. For a start, you are too involved with your product (what do you mean it's not easy to use? You just select this and do that and then this and...). And sometimes people just surprise you. If you make yourself available and easy to contact you'll also create good will – and your customers will be more likely to hang on in there if you have any teething issues with your product.

Don’t forget low-effort marketing activities

As soon as you think about ‘marketing’ certain strategies come to mind: perhaps Facebook advertising, SEO, content marketing and social media buzz. However, don’t forget low-effort marketing activities as well! Features such as one-click upsells can make you more money without any additional marketing spend. On average, SendOwl sellers make between 4-20% more revenue from one-click upsells (here's the data post). These work because once people are in your sales funnel they are psychologically prepared to spend money. So they are more likely to say ‘yes’ when you ask them if they’d rather have a more expensive item or another one as well. Discounts and pay what you want pricing can also be effective marketing techniques that require little in the way of marketing spend.

Chance your arm

Why not contact journalists, bloggers or influential tweeters in your field? You never know. I worked with one self-published author whose book was quite unexpectedly picked up by a national newspaper. Guerilla tactics can also work, if you have the right attitude to carry them off.

Start selling

Good luck with selling your products! And if you’d like more information on selling digital products we’ve written these articles to help:

Stripe Payment Links

2021-07-19T15:11:00Z

Stripe recently launched ‘no code’ Payment Links to help merchants sell their products anywhere. In their words “create a full payment page in just a few clicks and share the link with your customers—no code required”.

Today, we’re excited to announce that SendOwl is fully integrated with Stripe Payment Links! SendOwl has already delivered $1.7 billion of digital content, and we’re bringing years of digital content delivery expertise to no-code selling.

What does that mean? It means you can use Stripe Payment Links to accept payments in minutes, without a line of code, and then have SendOwl immediately deliver your digital content to your buyer, again, without a single line of code.

No code selling

The internet revolutionized the world and, more specifically, it revolutionized how you, a content creator, can reach your audience. A fan of your work can reach out and see your work no matter where they are or what device they are using.

But, let’s be honest, that needed a website. Coding. HTML. Scripting. And all the stuff a content creator may not have time for or expertise in.

I mean, in the brick-and-mortar world, a business doesn’t build its own store. Why should you have to do that same thing online?

The truth is, the next revolution is “no code” selling and SendOwl is at the forefront of how you present, sell, and deliver your digital content.

What does it mean for me?

Let’s look at a simple example. You’ve created an ebook you want to sell to your audience.

With Stripe Payment Links you can quickly and easily create a link to share with your audience. Whether in an email, on a webpage, or in a chat. Share one link where they can buy your ebook (or video, or music, or anything else you create or can think of).

Then, SendOwl will securely deliver the digital files to your buyer. It doesn’t matter if the buyer is on a desktop or their phone, within seconds of buying your product via Stripe Payment Links, they can be reading your ebook. Safely and securely delivered by SendOwl.

Is that it?

Nope. I mean, that’s pretty awesome, but it’s not enough. How about you personalize the ebook and stamp the buyer’s name on it? Or their email address (that’ll stop them from sharing it with someone else!)

Want to send multiple digital files to the buyer? Again, no problem with SendOwl. Create a bundle and deliver two files. Let’s be crazy: deliver 10 personalized PDFs, stream two videos, and throw in a couple of your latest songs.

All no code. All delivered instantly with SendOwl.

Want to read more about how simple it is to sell with Payment Links and deliver with SendOwl? Then head to our amazing help site: Payment Links Help Articles.

Are there other types of Payment Links?

Yes. While we are proud (and excited) of our integration with Stripe Payment Links, you can also use SendOwl Payment Links and sell via the SendOwl checkout. Of course, the same secure digital delivery applies here too!

So when you upload a file to SendOwl, you have instant access to SendOwl Payment Links to share anywhere you like. Emails. Chats. Forums. SMS.

Copy it. Share it. Sell it. Deliver it. All no code.

We can’t wait to see how you’ll use no code Payment Links and if you have any thoughts or feedback, let us know!

Cheers, SendOwl.

Offering Per Product PDF Stamping Feature

2021-05-12T17:27:21Z

Until now, PDF stamping has been configured at the account level which means that all PDF products in your SendOwl account had the same stamp applied to them. While that worked for many, a common request was to enable different PDF stamps for different products.

Wait no longer! 'Per product' PDF stamping is here!

PDF stamping

It might come as no surprise, but PDF stamping is one of the most popular functions we offer at SendOwl.

It allows you to personalize a buyer's purchase as the PDF can include order details such as the buyer's name and email address. Alternatively, if the buyer is gifting the purchase to someone else, the recipient's name can be stamped on it.

Another popular use case is to add a license key or code to a PDF. The buyer can take a printed copy to a store or restaurant where the code can be used for a discount (or they can simply show the PDF on their mobile device).

PDF stamping can also help reduce file sharing as unique and important order information can be stamped on every page! You can read more in our help site article:

https://help.sendowl.com/help/pdf-stamping

Account level PDF stamp

Traditionally, a PDF stamp was configured at the account level which meant the same message was applied to all PDF products in your account.

While that works well if you need a simpler stamp with the buyer's name and email address, it can cause challenges if you have different PDF page sizes or layouts. For example, an A3 PDF in landscape will have a stamp applied in a different place than a Letter PDF in a portrait orientation.

And what if you need completely different messages on different PDFs?

New 'per product' PDF stamp templates

Well, we're very proud to remove that restriction, and you can now create 'per product' PDF stamp templates!

That means that you can create a different PDF stamp for every PDF product in your account, or share the same template between some products, and another template for the rest:

How you mix and match your PDF stamp templates is down to you, but we think you will agree, this is a huge step forward in SendOwl being at the center of your digital delivery needs!

Read more about configuring 'per product' PDF stamping here:

https://help.sendowl.com/help/pdf-stamping

Cheers, SendOwl.

Enhanced Subscription Reporting

2021-04-21T15:33:10Z

Subscriptions are a powerful product and an important tool for any merchant looking to keep buyers engaged with fresh content and generating predictable income streams.

SendOwl offers file access and drip subscriptions; however, analyzing subscribers, their orders, and usage patterns was not so easy. Until now.

Five new reports

We're happy to announce that we've released 5 new reports to help supercharge your subscriptions. You can now track individual payments, analyze sign-up and cancellation trends, and track dunning payments much more easily.

Let's take a quick look at each report and what they offer.

Active subscriptions

While you've always been able to generate an orders reports, the new 'active subscriptions' report means you can quickly and easily analyze all your active subscriptions.

It includes details such as the order ID, subscription start date, and how many payments have been made. All with the aim of enabling you to see and track trends in sign-ups and average length of subscription.

Dunning subscriptions

When a subscriber misses their regular payment, possibly for genuine reasons such as forgetting to update their card, the subscription goes into what's known as a 'dunning' state. In other words, the subscriber's payment is late, but the subscription has not yet been cancelled.

This report immediately filters out orders that are in that dunning state, and it includes details such as the order ID, and when their payment was due.

Paused subscriptions

You may already know, but you can actually pause a subscriber's payments. You can read more about that incredibly handy tool here: pausing subscription payments

Following from that, what could be more handy than clicking a button to see those paused subscriptions? This report includes details such as the order ID, the date the payment was paused, and when the payment was originally due.

Cancelled subscriptions

Understanding cancellation trends is one of the most important things you can do as a merchant. Do your subscribers often cancel after 6 months? 3 months? In April of each year?

Being able to see those trends and take action is even easier with this report as it includes details such as the order ID, when the subscription started, how many payments were made, and when the subscription was cancelled.

Subscription payments.

Subscriptions really are one of the most powerful tools when it comes to building up predictable income streams and when you have a healthy subscriber base, tracking each payment can be a challenge.

Well, no more! With this report, you select the time period, and we show each individual payment and match it to a specific order ID. With details such as the amount, currency, and number of payments made, it becomes a powerful payment tracking tool.

Where are they?

Enough already! Where are they? All SendOwl reports can be found in the main 'Reports' section of the Dashboard: SendOwl dashboard reports

Help article(s)

Naturally, it wouldn't be SendOwl without a matching help article! Here's the help article which discusses the reports in more details: Generating subscription reports

But wait...

Are the reports missing something? Does the dunning report need an additional column to make just that bit better? Do we need an entirely new report?

If so, let us know. We'd love to get feedback and ideas on how we can help you sell and manage your subscription products even better at SendOwl.

Finally, keep an eye on our blog for more subscription enhancements coming soon (Shopify subscriptions anyone?)

Cheers, SendOwl.

Feature Release: Product Swap (aka Product Conversion)

2021-03-30T16:13:56Z

We're exciting to share a new feature where you can swap (or convert) one product type with another for your existing orders.

This is perfect if you've ever sold a standard digital product only to realize, weeks or months later, that you actually want the buyer to access multiple files. In other words, you want to swap the standard digital product they purchased with a bundle product containing multiple files.

Or perhaps you accidentally deleted a product and now your buyers don't have anything to download? No need to panic because with the product swap, you can swap out the now deleted product with a brand-new one. Simple!

Or maybe you sold a redirect product and now realize it's the wrong product type? No problem, just swap the redirect product with the product type you prefer.

What happens when I swap a product?

What does it actually mean? What happens when I swap a product type?

Let's say you've been selling a standard digital product where the buyer downloads a PDF named "Owl keeping for beginners".

Sales have been going very well! However, you recently created a wonderful video to accompany the ebook. The challenge is you want your existing buyers to be able to download the video alongside the PDF. What to do?

Well, being a savvy SendOwler, you create a bundle product that contains both the original PDF and the new video (see here for details of creating a bundle product: https://help.sendowl.com/help/multiple-files).

The next step is to simply swap the product they purchased (the standard digital product) with the new bundle that contains the two files.

Once completed, when the existing buyer goes to their download page, they will see both the PDF and the video available for download.

How do I achieve this mastery?

I'm glad you asked! Head straight to the product swap page in our control panel:

https://www.sendowl.com/settings/order_product_swap/new

All you need is the old product name (or tell us the product was deleted), the new product name, and an example order ID where the buyer purchased the old product, and you want them to have access to the new, different product type:

Do you have a help article?

We sure do! We love our help site, and it's always the quickest way to get your questions answered. In this case, here's the help article:

https://help.sendowl.com/help/product-swap

I just want to update the file, not swap the product!

Swapping the product type may be a step too far for some merchants when all you need to do is update the file the buyer purchased.

For example, perhaps your buyers purchased an ebook called "Owl sculptures". However, you now want them to have access to an updated version of the ebook.

In this case, all you need to do is update the file in the product settings itself - there's no need to swap the entire product type.

As you might expect, we've got a help article to take you through the steps of updating the file in the product:

https://help.sendowl.com/help/update-existing-products

Cheers, SendOwl.

New changes to SendOwl

2021-03-23T16:00:19Z

SendOwl.com just got an update! We thought it would be fitting [and far overdue] to give the website and our brand an update during our 10th year.

While there's always the way-back-internet machine if we miss the original SendOwl.com, we think our new site reflects both where we've come from, and where we are going; specifically, our strong roots in digital product checkout and delivery, but also our aspiration to enable more use cases for our creators, entrepreneurs, side hustlers, SMBs, and even larger companies. If you sell digital products online, we want SendOwl to be the critical part of your stack for many years to come.

And we're just getting started. 10 years in, and there is still so much to do. This update is meant to serve as a starting point for the many great things we have planned now that we've added more engineers and resources to our team.

Next week, we'll be launching a new product swap feature, and we've just started a design and engineering sprint which will update the UI of the SendOwl Dashboard and our Checkouts - both planned for a mid-to-late springtime release. We'll also be adding advanced subscription offerings via SendOwl and Shopify, and supporting more payment methods (hello AmazonPay!). After that, we’ll be prioritizing deeper integrations with additional platforms, and giving our affiliates program an upgrade. All this and more is just the beginning of our larger investment to help us achieve our mission: to increase digital product sales globally.

Most importantly, none of this would be possible without our amazing community of users and followers. To all of you, a sincere thank you for joining us on this journey. We’ll always have a strong affinity for our original owl and all that we’ve accomplished so far, but we hope you’re as excited as we are for our new owl and the exciting future she brings.

Onwards,
The SendOwl crew

Brexit, VAT, MOSS, and other fun stuff

2020-12-28T18:56:12Z

With Brexit firmly on the horizon and Jan 1, 2021 rapidly approaching, if you sell digital items to the UK or the EU it’s likely time to take action given recent developments.

Getting ahead of the upcoming changes will put you at the front of the line given many other people will also be applying for UK VAT registration and/or changing VAT MOSS services.

First though, while we do our utmost to give you up-to-date, accurate information, the following should not be considered formal accounting, tax nor legal advice. You should definitely speak with a legally licensed and qualified tax professional who is familiar with both the products you sell, and the local and regional regulations where your business is registered!

Q4, 2020 VAT MOSS

For UK and EU sales up to, and including, Dec 31, 2020, nothing changes. You can still download the VAT MOSS report and submit it as normal for Q4, 2020.

The Q4 VAT MOSS return needs to be submitted, as normal, by Jan 20, 2021.

VAT reporting from Jan 1, 2021

Where things change are for sales to the UK and the EU from Jan 1, 2021.

Let's look at 3 categories of sellers of digital goods.

UK Sellers
EU Sellers
Non UK/EU Sellers

Each group will have different requirements when it comes to reporting VAT and tax returns.

Seller	What changes?	What do you need to do?
UK Seller	Can no longer use UK VAT MOSS service.	Apply for 'non-Union' VAT MOSS scheme.
EU Seller	Can no longer use UK VAT MOSS service and no longer submit UK Sales via VAT MOSS.	If you were using UK VAT MOSS, apply for 'Union' VAT MOSS service and apply for UK VAT registration for UK Sales.
Non UK/EU Seller	Can no longer use UK VAT MOSS service and no longer submit UK sales via VAT MOSS.	If you were using UK VAT MOSS, apply for 'non-Union' VAT MOSS service and apply for UK VAT registration for UK Sales.

VAT rate changes

Interestingly, the majority of the Brexit induced changes are focused on reporting VAT to the respective governing bodies and there are few VAT changes for digital goods services. For example, the reverse charge mechanism still applies.

We will, of course, include VAT changes in our EU/UK tax configuration and, come April 1, generating your Q1 VAT MOSS and UK VAT reports will be as simple as clicking a button and getting the report delivered to you.

EU and UK Websites

These can be stressful times and no one likes VAT and TAX (well, not many people!) and while there's a lot of information out there, some of it is contradictory in nature.

As mentioned above, we recommend you speak with a qualified tax professional about your business.

You may also find the following UK government and EU websites a good resource for help with your EU and UK VAT questions or concerns.

UK Government "Brexit Checker"

https://www.gov.uk/transition-check/questions

European Commission website:

https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/vat-digital-services-moss-scheme/index_en.htm

Paul, SendOwl.

It's quiet... A little too quiet!

2020-12-15T15:19:52Z

I think the title says it all but there's no denying our public presence has been a bit, er, lacking in the past few weeks, months, and years!

There's no specific reason for stopping posting. We've been focussed on internal development work such as finalizing SCA, Privacy Shield changes, adding Stripe Standard Connect, and so on; which, while not always newsworthy or pretty, is incredibly important for you as merchants and for our own stability. The truth is we got out of the habit of updating the blog and letting you know we are still here and growing with you!

Speaking of which, our growth continues to amaze and humble us as we've always relied on word of mouth (or word of 'mouse'). In fact, we're in the process of hiring a few more people to help us get us to the next stage of our growth.

Why post now?

Well, two reasons. Brexit and SCA (Strong Customer Authentication).

Many SendOwl merchants are based in the EU or conduct business with the EU and Brexit is going to impact all of us.

As time slips by, the EU and UK are forecasting there will be a 'No Deal' Brexit but, given that it's 2020, I'm not placing my bets on any specific outcome.

What I can say is that we are monitoring the situation closely, and we will update the automatic EU tax rules as soon as we know something concrete.

Now onto SCA. If you integrated your Stripe account with SendOwl (so your buyers can pay by card) then SCA is incredibly important to you as without it, payments will stop being processed by the banks. But don't worry, as you've come to expect, we've got it in hand.

While the initial SCA requirements came into force on September 14, 2019, several EEA countries decided to delay full implementation until December 31, 2020. That date is almost on us and we're making sure we're ready to flip the switch and offer full compliance in plenty of time for the deadline.

And lastly, it won't be another decade (in owl years) before we post more updates.

Paul, SendOwl.

Re: Account changed emails sent out today

2018-12-03T16:10:05Z

This morning, we were the target of an individual trying to get a list of our customer email addresses. Many of you received an email from us telling you that your SendOwl email address had been changed. If you got such an email, we’re really sorry that you were spammed and please be assured that you did not and still do not have an account with SendOwl.

What went wrong?

When a merchant changes their email address, we send an email to their old email address notifying them about the change. If the new email address entered is already a SendOwl account, we showed an error message. If the new email address was not in our system, we allowed the change.

The individual cycled through their own list of email addresses and spammed the change email feature. When an email address they tried was not a SendOwl user, the change went through. That email address would then get notified by us when the individual changed the account email to another non-SendOwl account email.

What have we done about it?

We’ve deployed additional security steps to the change email page. Users will need to complete a captcha before they’re allowed to change the email address on their account. Further, if we receive more than a certain number of these requests in a short period of time, we will disable the feature entirely.

What does this mean for you?

For those who received an email from us, please accept our sincerest apologies for the unsolicited email.

Please know that your email address was entered in by the individual. That means your email address is likely part of a database containing email addresses from another impacted site. If you receive any marketing email in the near future from a service that helps you sell digital goods, we’d appreciate you letting us know about it so we can identify the individual who has caused these events.

While we would love for all of you to be SendOwl users, please be assured that you did not get that email because you are/were a SendOwl merchant, or previously purchased an item from a SendOwl merchant.

EU GDPR

2018-03-19T17:59:15Z

On 25th May 2018 new EU laws on data protection come into force. These are known as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). You've probably read a lot about these around the web as most internet firms work out how it's going to affect their services. There's a lot of huff and puff going round but on the whole the rules are pretty good for consumers (if a bit of a pain for businesses to work out how they're affected).

What are the new rules?

The new rules cover a lot of areas so we've written up the details in a GDPR help article. Broadly speaking though the new laws give EU individuals rights on their personal data such as a right to access, modification and deletion, as well a right to obtain information about what data companies are storing and what they're using it for. The rules also go down the date sharing chain - so if you are selling with SendOwl then you need to be complaint, as does SendOwl, as do our service providers and so on.

How do I find out more?

Our GDPR help article has all the information you need.

Your new customisable checkout system is here!

2017-09-19T15:24:23Z

Today is LAUNCH DAY. The day you see your new customizable checkout system in all its detailed glory. The day we've been dreaming about for months. And months. In the last post we looked at the three main things that will be possible, so without further ado, let's talk you through each in turn.

Attention Shopify customers! We don't provide your checkout – Shopify does – so you won't be able to use the new SendOwl templates for the checkout but you can for order/download pages..

1. Choose your own checkout template

tech skills needed: none

You now have a choice of 3 very different checkout designs. These are:

The marketer's checkout

Hinted at in our build up blog post on Monday this checkout has a series of great benefits for online marketers:

all information on one page
trust logos
key benefits of product/service reiterated on page
images of product/service
gifting option
discount option
one-click upsells option
8+ payment methods for customers
design used to highlight key information

You'll only see the fields you're using so this can actually be quite a nice compact checkout if you're only requiring a name/email and payment details.

The e-commerce checkout

This checkout is similar to major retailers' checkouts around the internet to reassure customers and is great if you've got a more "traditional" customer base. Basic features:

all information on two pages
gifting option
discount option
one-click upsells option
8+ payment methods for customers
discreet, modern design to channel customers through the checkout

As before the screenshots above show lots of checkout fields - what will be shown on your checkout will be dependent on your account settings. If you don't have any T&Cs to accept for example this box won't be shown.

The SendOwl checkout

This is the current SendOwl checkout as you know it (assuming you've upgraded to the new version - if not now is a great time). It features:

streamlined lightbox checkout over a number of screens
minimal design to encourage quick conversions
gifting option
discount option
one-click upsells option
8+ payment methods for customers
tested over the years!

How you can choose your own template

Now there's a choice of checkout you're going to need somewhere to choose them. Head to Settings -> Checkout Template and you'll be find a page like this:

Simply click the Use button on the checkout you'd like to have. Note our legacy checkout, shown here in the top left, is only available on older accounts (we also recommend moving away from this long term).

We think the ability to choose between checkout styles is going to be a real game changer for a lot of our customers. A more tailored checkout to your audience inevitably leads to a higher conversion rate and more money in the bank. With these initial three checkouts we've covered off most cases that customers ask for but expect to see more designs in the future.

2. Customize your own checkout's functionality

tech skills needed: none to some HTML and CSS

We appreciate that every business is different, so you want as much choice as possible in terms of what your checkout shows and what it doesn't. With this release we've made it possible for you to alter the functionality of your chosen checkout. Non-technical customers can easily alter translations or images for the checkout. And those with technical skills, or access to a designer, can easily start playing with style changes such as moving fields around or altering the order in which checkout pages are shown. Everything that can be controlled by HTML, JS or CSS can be altered which is basically everything about how the checkout looks. This brings a whole level of customization that wasn't previously possible to the SendOwl checkout.

To make this type of customization, you'll need to duplicate a template (available under the Options dropdown) on the Settings -> Checkout Template page. You can then dive into the files that make up the template to change the area you want. Our designers reference guide has all the information you need to start making changes but if it's just a simple translation/CSS/JS change then it should be possible to do that without any background reading of the guide (which is really for those who want to do advanced things or create their own checkout from scratch).

We'll publish some step-by-step guides on making the simpler changes, eg altering translations, that don't need any technical knowledge so all customers can do this without support.

If you've got just a little bit of HTML experience, or are technically curious, then the idea is that you would be able to make most changes yourself without help. If you wanted to swap two fields around for example, it's easy to see that code in the template file and then do a simple copy/paste to swap the contents around. Although we appreciate this won't be something some of our less technical customers will do, it will be possible for most customers to dive in and get their hands dirty.

Here's what a translation file looks like - as you can see it's super simple for even the less tech au fait to edit this and make the changes they want.

With the ability to edit checkouts we've not only released something that is extremely useful for sellers (& nobody else in our space has done), but also laid the ground work for our third feature: the ability to create your own checkout from scratch. Talking of which...

3. Build your own checkout

tech skills needed: advanced

This is for all of you with very specific ideas about how you want your checkout to look and function. Customization of an existing checkout can get you so far but there's plenty of cases where that just won't cut it. Want to ask for the credit card number before email address? You can do that. Want a checkout that moves vertically between steps? You can do that. Want a sixteen step checkout process? You can do that (not sure why you'd want to do this but I digress).

Creating a checkout from scratch is a really powerful system where all the hard work building a checkout has been extracted out and is handled by us. You can focus on the layout (HTML), styling (CSS) and interactive parts (JS) and leave the rest to us. This makes creating your own checkout extremely quick and you get all the SendOwl features baked in too - it's no extra work for example to add upsells, email marketing lists etc etc.

We've seen some checkouts so heavily customized over the years that we didn't know they were SendOwl ones. We've also had customers email us about the limits of how much they can customize their checkout. This feature removes that bottleneck and allows our more technical customers to get the perfect checkout to match their website/match their opinions on how a checkout UX should work/experiment and see what converts best for their customer base. We can't wait to see what you get up to!

With great power comes great responsibility so we recommend reading our designers reference guide before getting started. There's also a really cool tutorial there where we build a checkout that looks like a credit card as a demonstration of capability.

Here's what the editor looks like which we've kept purposely simple and easy to use:

This feature isn't for everybody - we know that. But for the 5% of customers who love customization to a deep degree it's going to make a real difference. Make sure you reach out and let us know what you get up to as we're planning a blog post featuring the best custom designs in the near future.

Three big changes – and more to come

Although we're very happy to have reached LAUNCH DAY with at least a semblance of our sanity intact, we'll be pushing on with more improvements after a well deserved break. A lot of the work here has been under the covers stuff to allow all this to happen technically. With that out the way it's going to be easy for us to add more design templates, more advanced functionality and information about how different checkouts are performing for example. For now though, we hope you're happy with the new customisable checkout system and are looking forward to giving it a try!

Find our more (and sign up for our free trial)

What you can expect from your new checkout

2017-09-19T11:53:17Z

At the end of last week we wrote a blog post about what we've been up to since 2010 and what's up next: namely a checkout system that works for everyone, no matter what their business model, audience base and expectations.

Now, with only 2 days to go before launch, we're prepared to spill the beans about what you can expect from your new checkout system. At least to some extent. You can't expect us to tell you everything pre-launch!

Checkout Templates

Checkout Templates is our new way to manage the checkout experience your customers get with SendOwl. This will allow you to do three main things:

1) You can choose a checkout template from one of our preset designs. As we said in our last blog post the SendOwl checkout has been optimised to be extremely high converting. But that doesn't necessarily mean it'll be the best design for your niche. The checkout for a computer programmer selling an ebook to a technical audience has very different requirements from a knitting designer selling patterns to a predominantly retired following. With our different designs you'll be able to choose the checkout that best works for your audience.

2) You'll be able to customise the checkouts to a high degree including leaving out fields you don't need, making copy tweaks, changing translations, performing stylist changes and much more. One of the most common requests we get into support is about making small tweaks to the checkout so it better fits your needs. With this change it'll possible to do that.

3) For the more technical customers it'll be possible to build your own checkout from scratch. We've seen some amazing customisations of our checkout over the years - so much so in some cases we didn't realise it was ours! With this change it'll be possible to code the checkout right into SendOwl. We'll take care of the all the payment/behind the scenes stuff leaving you free to focus on the HTML/CSS/JS to make the checkout look exactly how you want.

The marketer's checkout

Here's a sneak peak of one of our new pre-designed checkouts. We've called this one the marketer's checkout because it conforms to best practice in the marketing industry.

Two days and counting

That's all for now. We've beta tested the new checkout system. We've made improvements. We've drunk a lot of coffee. And in two days the new checkout system will be available for everyone. Look out for our LAUNCH! email. Wohoot!

Find our more (and sign up for our free trial)

Seven years of SendOwl – what's next?

2017-09-11T17:28:00Z

Here at SendOwl we like to redefine the boundaries of what's possible in our industry. If that seems like a rather grand claim, then let's see if we can prove it to you. And then we'll show you what's next.

The SendOwl story

In 2010 George Palmer founded SendOwl on $50. George was actually trying to find a decent way to sell an ebook online but failed miserably. So he set out to create a solution for himself that turned out to be a slightly bigger side-project than anticipated. George quickly found that what he was offering – even as a minimum viable product – was streets ahead of the competition. So SendOwl became his main project and his ebook never saw the light of day.

By 2011 George had focused SendOwl around two key qualities: reliability and ease of use. We're still back in the scrub land of the Internet here. Things broke a lot, and plenty of software was only really easy to use if you were technically gifted, or perhaps clairvoyant. True, there was some improvement. Microsoft has retired Clippy, which was obviously a step in the right direction. But there was still work to be done. And George was determined that SendOwl would be up there, leading the way in terms of digital delivery.

At a time when using software often left you frustrated, SendOwl was pioneering the concepts or reliability and ease of use

By 2013 SendOwl was growing nicely. As well as reliability and ease of use, SendOwl stood out from the competition for the quality of its design. Our preference was for a clean, simple and high converting design, that made life easier for our customers and also for their customers. SendOwl was also becoming known for the quality of its customer support. Which at this point was personally led by George, working very, very hard.

By 2015, SendOwl was on a roll. Customers liked the baseline product, which was getting more powerful by the month. So what was next? SendOwl customers soon has their answer: an ability to sell more. The SendOwl vision was to make it possible for customers to extract the most value possible from every potential sale. So in came one-click upsells, on-site checkout, gifting, and plenty more. The affiliate scheme, launched in 2014, was expanded to become more powerful. SendOwl changed their strapline to 'Sell more digital products with SendOwl'. Because it was true.

By 2015 SendOwl had focused on helping customers sell more

What's next?

So that brings us to very early 2017. Picture the scene: a new year, hangovers almost gone, and a feeling that we wanted to start pushing those boundaries again. Because that's what happens when your company is run by high-achieving developers. So, what next we asked ourselves? But we already had an answer. For some time 'customisation' has been picking up pace as a request from our customers. This was understandable: customisation and personalisation has been sweeping the internet as major trends, controversial, useful and fantastically futuristic by turn. No one wanted software that worked any more: they wanted software that worked perfectly for them.

We knew what direction we'd like to head in. But we still felt like crying. Why? Because customisation is hard. Nail-bitingly hard. Even massive corporations like Facebook make a mess of it on a regular basis and our competition haven't even attempted it (sensible people). So our rather more modest team was going to have their work cut out. However, we've never yet taken the easy road when the harder road leads to better results.

And it's been a very hard road indeed, because we've planned a checkout system that works for everyone, no matter what their business model, audience base and expectations. True, on average our checkout is one of the best converting out there, but we wanted to cater to all customers – each and every one. To give them the chance to design a checkout that converts the best for them and that feels like a seamless part of their business.

So, we got our heads down and started planning; then developing; then developing some more. Plus we continued with all the usual work and the development improvements that you expect from us, including two factor authentication (2FA), a cart abandonment feature and a very popular sales description page.

Our sales description page, launched earlier this year, has proved very popular

Now, however, we're nearing the end of our checkout customisation project (emotionally, physically, and mentally). And we're really, really looking forward to making our new checkout system available to you. Not just because we'll be dewy-eyed to see our baby released into the world, but because we're really excited about how it will help you, our customers, shape your business and expand your sales.

Our new checkout system will be released very shortly. Keep your eye on your inbox at the start of next week and we'll email out with more exciting details.

EU VAT rules changes coming in 2019

2017-12-13T09:19:39Z

We've blogged fairly extensively about the new EU VAT laws that came into effect in 2015. Our opinion has always been that whilst the intention of these has always been a good thing (stop big corp dodging tax), the implementation has been a mess. I'm now glad to say the proposed changes we previously wrote about are on the way. Specifically:

Cross border sales under €10,000 per year can be handled according to rules of the home country
Simpler rules for cross-border sales up to €100,000 per year by only requiring proof of 1 piece of location information (rather than the current 2)
A new "easy-to-use" online portal provided by the EU to submit VAT returns rather than use a host country one (which can be especially difficult if you live outside the EU)

Sadly not effective until Jan 1st 2019 but it will mean life will become a lot easier for smaller sellers who have customers in the EU.

We'll update more on the implications nearer the time but until then enjoy the fact you won't be dealing with this much longer.

Customer Accounts

2017-10-16T15:04:16Z

We've please to announce a new feature that'll make life a lot easier for your repeat customers. Previously, when a customer made several orders with you, there was no way to access them all from one page. They had to save the order url for each order and access them all individually.

That has now changed with the introduction of customer accounts. Customer accounts allow buyers to setup an account which links all their orders, so all they need to do is visit your login url and login to see their previous purchases. Not only is this super useful for the customer, but we also think it'll lead to less support queries ("I've lost my download url").

Getting Setup

To enable customer accounts head to Settings -> Checkout Template and enable the checkbox. When you do this buyers will see a link to their account in the top right of the order download/complete page like this:

When they click this they'll go to an account area with all their orders:

You can also give access to their account page by providing a login link from your site. Head to Settings -> Downloads to get your unique link and include it on your site. Here's the login page the buyers see:

Claiming an account

Before a buyer can login to their account they must first claim it. To do this they visit one of their download urls and follow the account link in the top right corner as normal. A unique link is then sent to their email which they follow to complete the setup. This is all handled seamlessly and the system knows between those that have already setup accounts and those that just need to login.

Subscriptions work this way too

We've also reworked subscription management to use this system. Previously buyers had to use their email address and a transaction id to login. With this change they use the new account system which is much simpler and provides a flow the buyers expect.

Wrapping up

We hope you (and your customers) find this a welcome addition to the SendOwl platform. As always we'll be listening to your feedback so please send us any thoughts you have as you get up and running with it.

It's our 7th birthday!

2017-09-19T16:08:20Z

Wohoot! SendOwl is 7 years old today. That's a good age for a blue owl who's spent a lot of time recently head down on product development. If you look closely you might see a few grey hairs on his chin. But we think they only makes him look more distinguished.

To celebrate our birthday we've looked out 7 SendOwl facts to celebrate 7 wonderful years.

1. SendOwl sellers have together made more than $300 million

Actually that's not quite true at the time of writing, but later today and still on our birthday, it'll tick over. That's rather fortuitous timing and we're still really quite staggered that it was only back in May we hit one quarter of a billion dollars.

2. SendOwl sellers are as much global traders as multinationals, Mittelstand companies and Silicon valley unicorns.

The days are long gone when it was mostly big companies selling globally. A combination of globalisation, the internet and mobile technology has allowed almost anyone with ambition and an internet connection to trade cross-borders. And so many of you do! Even the World Economic Forum had recognised your contribution.

3. SendOwl sellers are busy creating world firsts

The amount and variety of products sold through SendOwl continues to amaze us. Take The Jamaicasaurus “the only translation dictionary to go from English to Jamaican Patois and the only Jamaican thesaurus in existence” for example. It's the kind of product that can only exist due to the Internet and we're proud to help these creators follow their passion.

4. SendOwl has helped create 40 millionaires

Solopreneurs, internet marketers, small businesses and high-volume sellers all rely on us to make their digital sales as easy as possible. And we love how successful many of you have become, often from very modest beginnings.

5. SendOwl is still run by George Palmer

George started SendOwl in 2010 with $50. It remains a small company, privately owned and customer-focused.

6. SendOwl sponsors an owl

We're proud to say that we're: "The only ecommerce platform that cares about conversion rates, ease of use, and owls". We even sponsor a barn owl called Tawny.

7. 9/10 SendOwl sellers would recommend us to a friend

We use our annual SendOwl survey to check in with our customers and ask what they like about SendOwl, what they'd improve, and how happy they are with us. This year (like last year) satisfaction ratings were very high. This makes us feel pretty chuffed and justifies our current plan: to work hard, invest in what matters to our customers, and keep a sense of humour along the way.

SendOwl is incredibly easy to use, and your documentation and help system are absolutely superb.

LOOK OUR FOR A BIG FEATURES ANNOUNCEMENT AT THE BEGINNING OF NEXT YEAR! We're pretty sure this will make our 8th year one of our best yet.

Using MailChimp's abandoned cart integration with SendOwl

2017-09-05T11:25:17Z

SendOwl makes it easy for you to sell digital products, services and subscriptions online. MailChimp makes it simple for you to share news, build your brand and automate your marketing. Together, they offer you a powerful way to sell and market your digital products to a global audience. Who'd have thought an owl and a monkey could make such a good team?

And now the good news: SendOwl sellers can now take advantage of MailChimp's new abandoned cart feature.

Research shows that 67% of online shopping carts are abandoned before the customer completes a sale. MailChimp

SendOwl also has its own abandoned cart feature, in case you want to rescue orders without involving MailChimp.

MailChimp's abandoned cart feature helps you reconnect with customers

The abandoned cart feature works by reminding customers what they've left behind and encouraging them to come back and complete the purchase. One SendOwl and MailChimp customer is already seeing promising results:

After one month of running, the MailChimp campaign has shown an impressive 78% opening rate with a 30% click rate. Sylvain March

Setting up the abandoned cart feature in SendOwl and MailChimp

For this feature to work you need a MailChimp account with ecommerce tracking enabled. If you're not sure about setting up ecommerce tracking, then read our help article on the subject.

Then follow these 3 simple steps:

Go to marketing from your dashboard and select 'cart abandonment'
Select 'new action' (if you haven't any cart abandonment instructions set up already)

Go to the 'actions' and 'email captured' section and tick 'MailChimp abandoned cart'.

That's it in terms of SendOwl. We'll now send uncompleted order data to MailChimp and you can decide how best to hook your nearly-customers back in!

For information on how you enable this feature in MailChimp please see their help article. Although don't be put off by the fact that they don't mention SendOwl. We do support this feature. We're just not an A-List partner: we're too indie for that.

Don't forget to plan your marketing for Black Friday and Christmas!

2017-08-09T11:21:16Z

Although it's only September, we're already seeing an increase in activity as you start gearing up for the super-charged shopping period that is Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the Christmas Holidays and the New Year. You can boost your income considerably during these sales spikes, but only if you're prepared. So we recommend getting your Black Friday and Christmas marketing plans in place now.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday can boost your income – we have proof

After doing some data crunching in a previous blog post, we found that Black Friday on average boosted customer income by nearly 400%.

Our key takeaways from our Black Friday blog post were:

Although income from non-US sales was slightly lower on Black Friday there wasn't that much in it. The income spike was 294% on average for non-US sales instead of 337%
Our seller's income increased on average by 200% (or 135% for non-US sales) on Cyber Monday from the previous week
Discounts formed the cornerstone of SendOwl sellers' marketing strategy for the sales period, with a big spike in discounts on Black Friday.
One-click upsell income peaked nicely on Black Friday and then had another spike on Cyber Monday, contributing to the overall income spike for SendOwl sellers over the sales period

Read the full blog post

Customers buy digital products at Christmas – usually last minute

We also found that SendOwl sellers saw a sales spike over the Christmas holidays. This goes to show that people buy digital products at Christmas, not just physical ones.

Our key takeaways from our previous Christmas blog post were:

Email out 3 times on 10th (build awareness), 17th, and early on the 24th
Don't be discouraged by a mid-December sales dip
Don't email on weekends
Do market your digital products as great Christmas presents – they are

Read the full blog post

Don't forget gifting

We support gifting, so your customers can buy digital products as presents for friends and family. This helps to multiply your potential customer base. Just make sure your customers know that this is a possibility.

Think strategically about your marketing

Marketing and conversion can be a challenge, as you told us in our 2017 SendOwl survey. So, here are a few tips on getting marketing to work for you:

First off, decide whether you want to try some low-cost marketing activities to increase revenue. These marketing actions include discounts, Pay what you want pricing and one-click upsells, all supported by SendOwl. If you're not sure how much to discount, we crunched some data to find out in this blog post TIP: 20% off is a good sweet spot.
Do more of what works for you already in terms of your marketing. Very few if any marketing tactics work for every business, despite the claims of internet marketers that this tactic will DEFINITELY make you £100,000 in a week. If you're not sure what works for you try testing out a few ideas to see if they result in more sales (always the most important metric!). If they do, you can invest more time and money. If they don't, bin the idea. Try not to have too many preconceptions about what will work. You might be surprised. For more tips on getting traction dip into TRACTION: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth.
Frame your marketing in terms of Black Friday and Christmas. Black Friday (and Cyber Monday) are all about exciting time-limited discounts. So set up a ticking clock on your site. Make people aware on any emails that this is a ONE DAY ONLY offer. Send people an email with an hour to go (and maybe an extra discount to take their breath away). And so on. Christmas is different. It's about gifts and friends and needing to hide in your room for a while because you can't cope with any more socialising. Make your marketing Christmassy. Show people why your digital product makes a great gift (much better than socks and perfume). Persuade shoppers that all is not lost on December 24th – they can buy a digital product present and everyone is happy.

How to sell your ebooks online (plus common misconceptions debunked)

2017-08-16T14:52:09Z

Perhaps you're part way through writing your ebook. You might even have finished it. And now you want to sell it online. But you're not sure of your next steps. You have lots of questions. Publishing sites warn you of all the challenges. Well, we're here to help. In this blog post, we'll take some common misconceptions about selling your ebook online and show how you can stop worrying and start selling.

Aren't customers more comfortable buying ebooks through major platforms like Amazon?

Not necessarily. In fact, many customers are getting fed up of how these major companies are tracking them and using their private data for commercial ends.

If you present yourself as a credible authority that won't spam your customers, sell their data, or chase them around the internet for ever after, then you'll be surprised at how much good will you can generate.

Not everyone is a fan of huge third party platforms and the way they track our lives

However, you do need your customers to feel comfortable buying from you. Here are some tips:

Make sure your blog, website or social media content is credible, well thought out and professional. You can't expect someone to buy your ebook if you have spelling mistakes on your blog, a website that looks terrible on mobile, or just a load of sales spiel that is as boring as it is unpersuasive.
Customise your checkout so customers have a seamless buying experience. Customers may bail on you if they are sent to a checkout that looks completely unrelated to your site. At least make sure your checkout includes your logo and brand colours. At best use a digital delivery company, like SendOwl, that allows you to fully customise your checkout.
Prepare your customer for checkout and what to expect. If you're using PayPal many customers won't know that they can pay using a credit or debit card rather than having to sign up for an account. So it's up to you to tell them before they press 'Buy Now' and arrive at a slightly confusing Paypal screen.
Reassure customers about security. So make sure you include contact details on your website or blog, consider using trust icons on your checkout, and work with a payment provider your customers trust (like PayPal, ApplePay or Stripe)
Offer different checkout options. Your customers are more likely to give you money if they can pay using their favourite payment method, whether that is ApplePay, Bitcoin, a debit or credit card, PayPal, or various European payment methods.

If I want to buy an ebook on Vehicle-2-Grid Communication (ISO 15118) then the content on this website is very persuasive – more so than the short description they'd be allowed on third party platforms

But don't I need to sell through a third party or publisher to make any money at all?

Nope. Say you decide to sell through Amazon, then what happens? Well, one book is added about every 5 minutes so you have a lot of competition to start with. Then someone searches for a book in your field: 'dog training' say. Maybe your book comes up, maybe it doesn't. It depends on your ranking. And whether you have bribed people to give you good reviews. A customer sees a bit of book blurb. There's not much else for them to go on. Is that enough for them to buy? Maybe. Maybe not.

Instead, you sell direct. What happens. Well, someone googles 'dog training' and your site comes up, particularly if you have quality content. Or you spark their interest through social media or a blog post that is interesting enough to be shared. A potential customers reads your free content. Tries out your advice. Comes back to your site and thinks: this person really knows what they are talking about. I'm in. Let's make a purchase.

And this is before we've got to the really big point: YOU MAKE A LOT MORE ON EVERY SALE SELLING DIRECT RATHER THAN THROUGH A THIRD PARTY. Typically, you'll be able to keep 90-95% of the cover price as opposed to barely 50-60% with a third party. That soon mounts up.

Keep more of your profits by selling direct from your website

However, you need to successfully market your ebook to stand a chance of selling your ebook. Here's some tips:

Create content that helps establish you as an authority on your subject. Jump in to discussions and offer helpful advice (on closed Facebook groups, on Quora, on a forum, wherever). Become known as someone who knows what they are doing. Even if you're selling fiction, you can establish yourself as an authority: on Regency London, or on vampires (I'd be up for this one – top 10 tips to slay a vampire without getting your hands bloody), or on what the future will look like in 100 years. Give away this content.
Share some of your ebook for free: preferably some of your best stuff. If you can get someone hooked then they'll have to buy the rest. Just be a little diplomatic. Share content that is self-contained. Don't stop mid sentence or mid-cliff hanger otherwise you'll just annoy your readers!
Ask colleagues and potential customers for feedback: this is a win-win situation. Share your work with your writing group, an online forum, a historical society or your colleagues, and ask them to help you improve your book. Some of them might like it so much they act as your cheerleader and encourage other people to buy it. They might even buy it themselves (unless you give them a free copy for their help).
Try your luck. It can be a bit dispiriting trying to get 'traditional' PR from newspapers and so on, but have a go. Identify an angle that is interesting or relevant to a current news event. Then contact journos through email, phone or social media. Think outside the box. At SendOwl, we got a very positive reaction when we approached the World Economic Forum blog because they loved our angle about how micro-entrepreneurs are the new multi-nationals.

Don't I need to activate DRM – and isn't this really difficult selling direct?

Well it is difficult, but also unnecessary. DRM is controversial because it tends to make things difficult for your loyal customers. They might struggle to read your ebook on a different device, for example. And given that people increasingly have a number of different devices, that seems rather unfair as well as short-sighted.

However, you've spent a lot of time on your ebook and you don't want to make it easy for people to share it without your permission. So, here are some security tips:

For PDFs, make sure you use PDF stamping. PDF stamping acts as a deterrent so people think twice about sharing your ebook because you'll know that they are responsible. At SendOwl we're also aware that ePub stamping would be very popular with out sellers (so watch this space!).
Make sure your digital delivery software is security conscious: so your customers are sent a secure link and have a set number of times they can download your product. That way rogue customers can't simply take a download link and use it to share copies of your book.
Make sure people have access to your ebook (if people can't buy your ebook in one country then you can't really blame them for trying to get a copy anyhow). Some major third parties make it easy for you to sell in Europe, say, but not so easy in other countries further afield.
Consider offering occasional discounts (like on Black Friday) so people who can't usually afford your ebook can grab a copy, if they're paying attention.
Make sure people want to buy from you rather than grab an illegal copy (because they love your content, or your story, or the way you post cool stuff on social media). If someone feels they know you and likes what you do, they are less likely to try and get hold of a ripped copy of your ebook.

PDF stamping can deter would-be copiers without penalising your loyal readers

Isn't selling ebooks direct from my website really difficult?

Well, it can be, but only if you want to do everything yourself. Personally, the thought of building my own checkout brings me out in a rash. However, there are some great companies who do all the hard work for you and charge a fairly modest fee (so you still get to keep 90-95% of your cover price).

These companies market themselves as ecommerce or digital delivery solutions. Ecommerce solutions can be a bit of an overkill (for example, Shopify are fab but you don't need them to sell ebooks – in fact, SendOwl works with Shopify to help them do this). Digital delivery companies (like SendOwl) concentrate on three main jobs:

Integrating with your payment gateway of choice (like Stripe or Shopify)
Providing a checkout (some like SendOwl offer a fully customisable checkout)
Automatically delivering your ebook to your customer

A few (like SendOwl) also help you with various marketing options like trying out one-click upsells, cart abandonment, discounts, Pay What You Want Pricing, Cart Abandonment, and more.

Mainly though, these service providers should be REALLY EASY TO USE. You should be able to get up and selling in a few minutes, as in:

Sign up
Upload your ebook
Get link to product page/checkout or embed button code on your website
Sell

Make sure you take a digital delivery or commerce solution for a test drive, so you can check that it is genuinely easy to use rather than just having a very good marketing site.

SendOwl gives you a free 30 day trial so you can see if you like us

I'm still worried about marketing. And design. And do I need to employ a proofreader?

All good questions, so we published an exhaustive blog post (well, exhausting for us, certainly) about how to publish an ebook in 23 simple steps to help.

We cover everything from your first idea for a book, through to writing, editing, proofreading, creating an ebook, marketing it, publishing it, marketing it some more, and deciding what to do next.

Good luck with your ebook – and do take us for a trial spin

Good luck with creating, marketing and selling your ebook. It can be tough, finding the motivation to keep going, and wondering how you can boost sales, but the rewards are considerable.

We've got many sellers here at SendOwl who make a living from selling ebooks. In fact, in total, our sellers have made more than a quarter of a billion dollars, and ebooks make up a good chunk of that. So that's a lot of money made from selling ebooks direct to readers!

Why not come join us at SendOwl and realise your authorial ambitions? We'd love to have you.

Find our more (and sign up for our free trial)

How to Sell Digital Products Without a Website

2017-08-09T13:36:15Z

We're delighted to announce the launch of our sales description page. This means you can send customers direct from social media or an email to a page that shows a picture, bullet points and a description of your digital product – even a video, if you want. This page also, of course, has a big Buy Now button.

You don't need a website to sell digital products

Previously with SendOwl you could send customers straight to the SendOwl checkout. However, this wasn't satisfactory if you felt your customers needed more information before they'd make a purchase. Now you can send customers straight from social media or an email to a sales decsription page, with a buy now button.

Sales description pages can also be useful if you have a blog or website. Not every prospective customer needs a lot of content. For example, you can send already engaged customer straight from an email to a sales description page. This may even boost you conversion rate because generally speaking the fewer steps customers need to take to buy the more likely they are to get on with it.

We provide a sales description template, not a landing page

We've had some requests to provide landing page templates. However, this is not the direction we want to go in. Landing page creation is best left to specialists. In fact, this is usually our policy in terms of certain feature requests: "partner with good people. Don't try and reinvent the wheel". If you do want help creating a landing page try Unbounce or Megaphone.

What's included in a sales description page?

There's room for an image, a few bullet points and a description. However, the description field is HTML so you can put what you want in there really, including more images and video.

To send customers to a sale description page you'll need to:

Select the product you want people to buy in your SendOwl dashboard. You'll see this copy and link: "The image and description fields can be managed on the sales details page". Select the sales details page link and edit accordingly.
Select the View Button Code link at the bottom of your product page. Go down to the "Sell from your website or blog. Use the code below to add a buy or cart button to your website or blog" section. Select "view product" code. Paste code in an email or social media. Wohoot! Job done.

Want an easy way to sell digital products? Join us at SendOwl. We'd love to have you.

See all our features

SendOwl survey 2017 (what you think of SendOwl, what we're up to)

2017-08-09T11:17:28Z

Thanks to everyone who filled in our annual SendOwl survey (4 questions, 5 mins, we know you're busy people!). We're always looking for new ways to help you grow your business and enjoy your time selling with us. So each year we send out a survey to gather feedback on what you see as important. Because ultimately, it's you – our customers – who decide our future direction.

You think we're doing pretty well

Our hard working development team were very happy to hear that so many of you like our range of features – from PDF stamping to license keys and even fraud filtering – and find SendOwl very easy to use.

“There is no specific feature that I like best, but I love how easy SendOwl is to use and navigate.”

We're also chuffed that 9/10 of you would recommend us to a friend. We're glad to hear it.

And if you do recommend us to a friend, don't forget that you can save money on your own SendOwl plan through our referral scheme.

Don't forget support

We're also pleased that so many of you rate our support team and documentation. So thanks to Paul, our support lead, for doing such a fab job.

“SendOwl is incredibly easy to use, and your documentation and help system are absolutely superb.”

Just remember that if you have any questions at all about SendOwl please do contact support. We usually find that at least 1/4 of features that you request through our survey are ones we already have. Now, this is undoubtedly our fault for not communicating their launch better, but we push out so many new features each year that some end up floating under the radar.

If you find yourself thinking: I wish SendOwl did this... then please search our help system and/or contact support just in case. Even if we don't support that feature, our help team will make a note of your enquiry. When we're prioritising features for the future, we take into account customer demand.

You want more customisation

This is something we've been aware of for some time. It's an understandable request because all your businesses are different, from your branding to the way you operate. It is possible to manipulate some elements of the checkout using either custom CSS or Javascript that can be added to your account. But we do have a game plan here.

Many of you find marketing and conversion challenging

Yep, we feel your pain. There are so many customers out there who would benefit from your product or service, if only they knew about it or could be persuaded to try it.

We're traditionally steered clear of offering you lots of marketing advice because there are so many people already doing this fairly well. We're having a bit of a rethink though. When there are so many people giving you marketing advice online it can be disheartening trying to work out who knows what they are talking about and who doesn't!

We're already created a few articles and blogs that should help you – see below. We'll also be appealing for recommendations on social media in creating a credible marketing and conversion resource list, which will also include tips from successful sellers. Tweet us @SendOwlHQ with suggestions or leave a message on our Facebook group.

Conversion

Marketing

Pricing

How much should I charge for my digital product? (data post)

7 reasons why you should sell digital goods from your own website

2017-07-11T10:35:31Z

Do you have a digital good to sell, or will do soon? Perhaps an ebook, crochet pattern, video series, music track, indie video game or something else? Good on you! Just don't limit your selling options by choosing a big third party platform without considering the alternatives. Selling from your own website, blog or social media platform can be a much better option for many sellers. Here are 7 reasons why you should sell digital goods from your own website:

1. Keep a lot more of your profits (easily 35% more)

With most of the major selling platforms, you're lucky to keep 60% of your profits. Just think: you could be paying a platform around 40% of everything you earn to do their job.

This might be the usual deal in the physical world, where shops routinely take 50% of the sale price of your product, but there's not so much excuse in the digital world.

After all, there are far fewer overheads for the third party online seller. It's not like Amazon or iTunes are having to pay rent for a huge store in downtown Manhattan.

If you do get customers to your website or blog and then send them off to a third party this is particularly poor payback for all your hard work. You have found that customer, not the big third party, so they are charging you top dollar just for sorting the mechanics of the sale. SendOwl charges from $9 a month to do this – a far cry from 40% of each sale.

By selling direct from your website you can bypass the rather substantial financial claims of these third parties, and keep around 90-95% of your profits, sometimes more.

Many large digital product sellers are beginning to look around for better alternatives to selling through huge third party platforms that take a large cut of their profits.

For example, in the last two years we've worked with Shopify to launch albums for Radiohead, Kanye West and Nine Inch Nails. These artists are choosing to sell music online direct to their fans.

Radiohead sell their music direct from their website

However, you don't need to be a big name to sell direct. Most of our SendOwl sellers are 'micro-entrepreneurs' and together they have made more than $250,000,000 since 2010. Some are well known in their industries, while others are just starting out. A few combine selling digital products with selling physical products or services.

I’m a consultant for vehicle-to-grid standardization. I trade my time for money. I wanted to find ways to make passive income while I sleep. So I set up an eBook to spread some post-surface knowledge about my industry. Those that want deeper knowledge come to me to hire my consulting services. I have a lot of [complicated tax reports](https://www.sendowl.com/blog/new-eu-vat-rules-2015.html) that I need to do, and SendOwl gives me all the data I need to do it quickly. Marc Mueltin, V2G Clarity

Case study: How much money can I make selling digital goods direct?

SendOwl charges from $9 a month for integrating with your payment gateway, providing a mobile-optimised multi-language checkout and sorting secure and automatic digital delivery. And we don't penalise you for success so if you sell more you still pay the same monthly fee.

Payment gateways (like Stripe and PayPal) typically charge between 1.4-2.9% per transaction plus a small fee (like 30 cents).

So, let's say you're spending $24 a month on SendOwl (a plan with lots of advantages for ambitious sellers) and you choose Stripe as your payment processor.

And you're selling on average 20 PC games a month at $30 dollars and 50 app games at $6 direct through your website (you plan to sell more!).

That means you make $600 + $300 = $900 from direct sales per month. Stripe charges 1.4% + 30c for each transaction (this is for European sales). That's $12.6 + $21 to Stripe = $33.6 And $24 to SendOwl. Bringing your total costs to only $57.6 per month. Meaning you keep almost 94% of your profits.

Plus even if your sales x10 per month you'll still only be paying SendOwl $24 meaning you keep an even higher percent of profits.

2. Stay in touch with your audience

One of the main problems with selling through a big third party is that you are kept at a distance from your customers. You can message customers through the platform but you don't usually get their details, even integrate with certain marketing software. But essentially you are only allowed to know as much – or as little - about your customers as that third party decides. Your customer information is a valuable commodity.

However, by selling direct through your website, blog or anywhere you can paste a link, then you can find out as much or as little as you want about your customers. And you can contact them when and how you choose.

For example, by tracing how your customers move through your site you can work out what content appeals to them and what doesn't, so you can do more of the former and less of the latter, improving your conversion rate. You can work out where your customers come from – and spend more time marketing sensibly to them on their own territory, rather than hoping that their Amazon search finds you rather than a competitor.

You can choose to get in touch should people land on your site, abandon a cart, or make a purchase. You can offer discounts, upsells and other offers when these are most useful to your customers.

In short, you can really get to know your customers and make life as easy for them as possible. And the more you know your customers the more likely you are to get more customers to your site, to increase your conversion rate and to increase the lifetime value of your customers. This last point is particularly important because it is much easier upselling or re-selling to an existing customer than to a new one. And it can lead to higher margins.

If you gain a customer through your marketing efforts but lose one you already had because you weren’t paying enough attention to her, you end up with the same number of customers—but lower margins--because it costs far more to gain a new customer than to keep an existing one. So, staying even—by adding one customer to offset every one who goes away—is actually causing you to lose ground (in the form of decreased profits that come about through increased marketing costs). That is no way to run a business. Paul B. Brown, co-author of Just Start

3. Keep your independence

By selling through a third party you are bound by their constraints: so you need to enter content in a certain way, sell in a certain way and contact your customers in a certain way. This can feel like a bit of a straightjacket. Mark Morris is the CEO of a very successful indie game lab called Introversion Software. Although they sell their games through third-party Steam (the biggest platform for indie game sellers) he makes sure they also sell direct. Hear why in this short interview:

Third party platforms can also change their terms and conditions, raise their prices or deal badly with a new problem and you can't really do anything. You're basically stuck with what they offer.

For example, when the EU changes its new VAT rules in 2015 some large third party platforms reacted in a very slow and confusing way.

I’m a US seller. An international buyer emailed me after she received her purchase and asked why she was being charged VAT even though she paid it all at checkout. Holy smokes! Etsy, you are causing a big problem with your wording. Fix it, O.K….?”

In contrast, our sellers knew exactly what was happening and could opt-in to our solution from day one.

4. Customise the selling experience

Although a large number of people sell digital downloads through third parties like Etsy and Amazon, they can find it hard to customise the selling experience.

For example, if you want to sell software online then you probably need:

To be able to sell the product with a license key to discourage people from downloading the product and selling it on
To be able to offer free updates as you improve your software – it's really not in your interests to have customers on old versions that require a lot of customer support

This kind of customised selling experience is not easily available on big third party platforms. Of course, support ecosystems have grown up around these major platforms that can help you to some degree with customising the seller experience. But that's an awful lot of faff and usually extra expense as well.

If you sell direct from your own website, you can choose exactly how you want to sell. For example, SendOwl sellers can easily sell products with license keys (you can either provide your own or we'll generate them). To offer free updates they just need to select one box. That's all. No extra expense. No faff. Just the customised selling experience you would choose, if you could.

Semplice labs sell their software direct from their website

5. Use your own charging model

Why be constrained by how a third party platforms thinks you should charge your customers? Rather than asking customers to pay a set fee and job done you could instead ask for:

Recurring payment

This is an excellent option for online software, games, magazines and many more digital goods. Selling an online subscription or membership means you gain recurring revenue (wohoot!) and can ease your cash flow. Plus it's a sustainable business model. The more content you create the more appealing you make your offer for customers.

In this article on subscriptions, we look at a number of case studies, including selling an online magazine, selling consultancy services, selling access to a membership forum and selling access to instructions about horses dancing (otherwise known as dressage).

Pay what you want pricing (PWYWP)

This is a great option for charities, for sellers with a strong back story, for sellers in more indie industries, and for sellers with a strong and supportive relationship with their customers. FACT: people often will give you more money than you ask for!

When we analysed the results from our sellers using PWYWP we find that customers routinely overpaid from the minimum amount, by an average of over 200%.

PWYWP is also a great way to expand your customer reach because it is really a marketing strategy rather than a pricing strategy.

This case study by four statisticians about trying out PWYWP for their book The Data Science Handbook makes interesting reading.

This is their conclusion:

After we analyzed our results, to our surprise, we discovered strong statistical evidence that with a PWYW model for our book, we could significantly expand our readership (by 4x!) while earning at least as much revenue (and potentially even more) as either of the fixed-priced variants.

One-click Upsells and cross-sells

Upsells are when you offer customers the opportunity to buy a more expensive product that is better suited to their needs (you say this persuasively!). Cross-sells are when you sell them an additional product that they can't do without.

Cross sells are famously used by third platforms like Amazon in their 'frequently bought together' and 'customers who bought this item also bought' sections. However, these cross-sells doesn't really benefit you if customers buy your product and then decide that, yes please, they'd like to buy an additional product – by someone else. Upsells and cross-sells should be about persuading customers to spend more on your products.

When we analysed our data, we found that upsells made our sellers between 4-20% extra revenue with no extra marketing spend.

This is how an upsell looks with SendOwl

Discounts

Discounts are a traditional and effective way to persuade customers to buy your product. You might want to offer a launch discount, a discount to a sub section of your audience, a discount on Black Friday, or for many other different reasons. But you want to be in control of when you offer discounts – and how.

This is again when selling digital downloads through third party platforms like Etsy and iTunes can make your business life just that bit awkward. You can't quite do what you want. You have to stick to their rules. In contrast, selling direct allows you to discount in a way that makes the most sense for your business.

For example, if you want to offer a discount to an email lists/member forums/private facebook groups then you might not want the discount code to be known to the wider world. So you need a solution that supports multiple codes per discount. SendOwl sellers can choose this option. Simple. Good luck with getting big third party platforms to help you with this scenario though.

6. Expand your existing physical products business/brand

There are many ways you can grow your business, but we've noticed that a number of our sellers have moved into digital product selling after having already establishing a brand selling physical products.

This can be for a number of reasons:

Digital products complement your physical products
Digital products offers a much higher profit margin (if sold direct)
Digital products are just easier (fewer overheads, logistics, and so on)
Digital products offer interesting ways to grow when your existing business has reached its natural limits.

I’m a full time artist and abstract painter. Primarily I deliver physical paintings to customers internationally. Shipping art is challenging because it’s so fragile. I knew that I wanted to start delivering digital versions of my paintings, so I switched my website from Squarespace to Shopify last year and I use SendOwl to deliver digital prints of some of my work and also e-training courses. I really love it! Amira Rahim

To be able to sell digital product, physical products and software products under one brand, you need a degree of control that the big third party platforms struggle to provide. This is because they are geared to help you sell one product for a fixed price. And your ambitions are much bigger!

7. Reach a global audience

Why not? All it takes to buy a digital product is an internet connection and some kind of electronic device, which means you have a potential audience of millions. SendOwl sellers have customers in 86 countries, selling to customers in every country in the world except eight small ones (Eritrea, Micronesia, Guinea-Bissau, Palau, South Sudan, São Tomé and Príncipe and Tuvalu if you're wondering).

You don't need a big third-party platforms to reach global customers. In fact, they can be more a hindrance than a help. Living in Britain, Amazon automatically asks me if I want to sell in all EU marketplaces, as though this is an impressive offering for £25 minus VAT per month. No, I want to sell to the world!

And the time is right for digital entrepreneurs to expand their horizons. A 2016 Accenture report concludes: “SMEs, especially those born Digital, are the new (micro-) multinationals in the game of e-Commerce.” The report goes on to say that “Until now, B2C online transactions have been mainly domestic (supply and demand from the same nation); however, cross-border e-Commerce is taking over as the key growth engine to B2C trade”

With a digital delivery provider like SendOwl you can genuinely find a global audience and they can pay you in a way that suits them – even using Bitcoins. No need to turn down customers because they don't have access to PayPal or to a credit card.

Sell digital goods direct – go on!

If you want to dip your foot in the water with selling direct that's fine – no problem. You can sell through Steam and SendOwl. Or iTunes and SendOwl. Or sell digital products online with PayPal (which SendOwl supports). Or of course you can come over to direct selling entirely, for all the very good reasons we've described above.

Just make sure that you have a strategy in place for selling your products and growing your business if you want to get the best results. For lots of useful information on digital selling browse our mega post: How to sell digital products (the definitive guide 2017).

Or see our pricing and sign up for a 30 day free trial

How to Sell Software Online & Keep Your Profits

2017-06-27T14:57:53Z

You want to sell software online, and you need it to be easy and profitable. Fair enough. In this article we'll concentrate on how you can sell software online from your website, blog or anywhere you can paste a link. We cover important issues such as license keys, offering free software updates, pricing, and choosing to bill people as a one-off or on a recurring basis.

Advantages of selling software direct from your website

You could sell your software through a third party platform that 'resells' your product and takes a hefty cut of your profits.

However, selling direct from your website, blog, or social media has a number of advantages:

Keep nearly all of your profits (usually between 90-95%, once digital delivery and payment processing fees are subtracted)
Build a relationship with your audience, who are then more likely to buy again from you or keep subscribing to your SaaS company
Ensure your product security with license keys, time limited download links and the ability to block people by email, IP address or region
Sell beta products, if you like, and offer free updates at any point
Choose to ask people to pay for a one-off product or on a regular basis. Even allow people to pay what they like (PWYWP), with a minimum price for peace of mind.
Sell to customers all over the world by having a multi-language checkout and accepting payment via credit or debit cards, Paypal, European payment options, BitPay or ApplePay

Sell your software to anyone, anywhere

How to sell your software online

Sign up with a payment gateway

To sell your software direct you need to sign up with a payment gateway such as PayPal or Stripe (Stripe is particularly good for credit and debit card processing). Digital delivery companies traditionally don't also work as payment processors. This is because payment processing requires considerable legal compliance and expertise. Digital delivery companies prefer to concentrate on what they do best and partner with payment processing companies instead.

As a guide Stripe charges 2.9% + 30cents per transaction (cheaper if you're in Europe: 1.4%), with no set up cost or monthly fee. Signing up is straightforward.

Consider your options

You can sell software direct from your blog, website or anywhere you can paste a link if:

You build your own checkout and manually deliver your product to people
Add a PayPal button and manually deliver your product to people
Add a PayPal button or similar and sign up with some kind of free digital delivery app

However, the first two options are time-intensive and off-putting to customers who want instant delivery and a choice of payment options. The third option is easier, but probably too basic for your needs and may not be very secure.

If you are serious about building a scalable business then consider signing up with a software savvy digital delivery service like SendOwl.

This type of digital delivery company at a very basic level:

Integrates with your payment gateway (s)
Provides a mobile-optimised checkout
Arranges secure and automated delivery of your software

Digital delivery providers like SendOwl also do a whole lot more, including providing low-cost marketing options such as one-click upsells, discounts, cart abandonment and gifting, linking up with all your other marketing, membership and mailing list services, and providing essential security features such as license keys and time-limited downloads.

The customer experience when buying your software

By selling direct from your website, blog or anywhere you can paste a link, you can make it very easy for your customers to give you money. This is a good thing!

They select a Buy Now or Add to cart button (the latter is better if you have a few complementary products).
They see a simple mobile-optmised checkout in their own language, with different payment options.
They enter a few simple details and payment is complete
They see a pop up window that allows them to download their software immediately – or they can click a link in an email

See how SendOwl makes it easy for people to buy your software in 20 seconds.

Avoid a checkout experience that adds friction by:

Asking for unnecessary information
Not working well on mobile
Having a confusing user interface
Just showing payment instructions in English if your customers speak a different language

Licenses for selling software online

If you don't want people to simply download your software and pass it on (even sell it on) then make sure you add a unique one-off license key to each product. In terms of security, license keys are fairly effective without being too annoying for your legitimate customers. It isn't a big ask for your customers to fill in one extra content field for a license key.

You can create your own license key system if you want, as discussed in this Stack Overflow exchange. However, if you don't have the time, patience or programming skill, then you're best using a third party like SendOwl.

You can manage license keys in these three different ways with SendOwl:

We can automatically generate random license keys for you
You can upload license keys to our server and we'll allocate them one at a time when you take an order
We can fetch license keys from your server as your orders come in

There is no extra cost for using license keys with SendOwl.

Sell as a one-off product or on a subscription basis

Make sure your digital delivery company makes it easy for you to sell your software as a one-off or as a subscription via recurring billing.

If you're selling your software as a subscription, then look for a digital delivery company that offers free and paid trials, a wide range of recurring cycles and email notifications when a charge, failed charge or expired card occurs, plus a sophisticated reporting and analytics section.

Sophisticated analytics and reporting will help you measure the success of your marketing tactics

Offer free software updates

This is a 'must have' feature for many software sellers with a loyal customer base. Offer existing customers free updates to the most recent version of your software and keep them happy.

It's usually in your interests that customers upgrade anyway: customers on older versions of your software might cost you more in terms of support.

Get marketing

You might have created the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, then your sales will be disappointing. We created The Beginner's Guide to Marketing to give you a few introductory pointers.

If you'd like more information on marketing your digital product see our in-depth article: How to sell digital products (the definitive guide 2017).

Offer pricing packages

Even if you're selling software as a one-off product, then consider whether you can offer pricing packages for different user groups.

Pricing packages are an effective way to maximise revenue as well as giving your customers the features they need.

For more information on pricing read out data-led article: How much should I charge for my digital product?

Get people to sell your software for you

Partnering up with people who like and understand your product, and can reach customers that you can't, is a useful way to increase your revenue as well as increase market penetration. To formalise this process, so everyone knows where they stand and you don't have to spend ages on the paperwork, start your own affiliate scheme.

If you'd like to find out more about what an affiliate scheme is, how it works and how to set one up then read our introductory affiliate scheme article.

SendOwl offers an in-built affiliate scheme, at no extra cost, so you don't even have to sign up for another service. SendOwl does the lot.

Good luck – and try us out for free

Why not join other software sellers in choosing SendOwl to easily, quickly and affordably sell and market your software? We offer a free 30 day trial so you can see if we're a good fit. Or check out our features page below.

See all our features

Accept Bitcoins through Stripe

2017-06-27T09:12:39Z

Stripe's Bitcoin integration means your customers can pay you in Bitcoins but you get paid in US dollars. This is because Stripe automatically converts your customers' Bitcoins to US dollars and pays out to your bank account.

Your customers have more choice about payment methods, but you don't have to worry about understanding and managing Bitcoins.

Does anyone want to pay me in Bitcoins?

Well, we can't say for certain, but Bitcoins have been gradually becoming more popular. In the last 24 hours alone the trade volume of Bitcoins has been listed by Blockchain as $231,926,113.00. In the last two years the price of Bitcoins has shot up, as you can see in the graph below.

There are a few reason for Bitcoins continuing popularity:

You can get paid by people all over the world, even from countries where credit cards are hard to come by or Paypal isn't supported
You cut out expensive merchant fees
You buy into a truly global currency that isn't manipulated by governments for political reasons.

What your customers see when they want to pay with Bitcoins

Your customers will see the Bitcoin icon at checkout.

Once they select this, then they are given three ways to pay: through a Bitcoin wallet app if they've one installed, via a QR code or by manually copying the payment address

And that's it: your customers get to pay in the currency they want and you get paid out as usual, in the currency you prefer.

Stripe is testing this feature with the US market first

Currently, you can only accept Bitcoins through Stripe if you are a US Stripe customer. However, we hope to see a global roll-out soon.

You also need to be on the most recent SendOwl checkout for this feature to work.

To get setup see our help article on enabling bitcoin support

How to sell digital products (The definitive guide 2017)

2017-06-20T11:43:17Z

If you've heard about digital products, love the idea, and want to find out more then this blog post is for you. If you have already started creating your first digital product and want to know more about selling and marketing digital products then this blog post is for you. If you are fed up with the 9-5 grind and want to launch your own global digital product business then this blog post is most definitely for you!

We cover everything you need to know in one handy guide.

Why sell digital products online?
What digital products can you sell online?
- Make money from something you're doing anyway or want to do
Do I need to sell through a third party marketplace like Amazon or iTunes?
- Sell both direct and through a marketplace
- Even major music studios are getting in on the act
- Advantages of selling direct
- Challenges of selling direct
- Can I really make more money selling products direct?
I'm going to create a digital product and sell direct: now what?
- Choose a payment gateway
What does a digital delivery company do?
- Providing a checkout
- Securely deliver your digital file
What price should I charge for my digital product?
- We do our best to answer the pricing question!
How do I market my product?
- Start early
- Ask for feedback
- Consider getting other people to sell your product for you
- Don't forget your pre-launch email sequence
- Don't forget no-spend marketing options
How can I improve my conversion rate and increase revenue?
What about theft, fraud and hacking?
I've got one of two products doing well – but how can I turn this into a business?
Checklist for selling digital products

Why sell digital products online?

Well, let's see: you create a product once and then sell it over and over again. You don't have any major overheads like shipping and warehousing. There's very little day to day management once you've created your products and main marketing material. And you can sell globally provided you and your customers have an internet connection (that's about 3,739,698,500 people as of March 2017: quite a market).

The internet offers a level playing field so you can make it big if you're just starting out – unlikely if you aspire to a physical shop on Bond Street or Fifth Avenue. And you can build a profitable – sometimes extremely profitable – business by creating a range of complementary products that appeal to a similar audience, by 'owning' a niche and by quickly exploring new ideas and trends.

Plus cross-border trade by entrepreneurs like you is predicted to be a huge growth market for the future. A 2016 Accenture report concludes: “SMEs, especially those born Digital, are the new (micro-) multinationals in the game of e-Commerce.” So eat our shorts, McDonalds and Burger King!

Sell your digitals products from anywhere, to anyone

What digital products can you sell online?

Anything you like. There really is no 'best digital product to sell online'. Rather, you need to capture the interest of your audience, persuade them they need your product, and assure them you're an authoritative source. When our team at SendOwl crunched the numbers we found that selling ebooks and other PDFs online is super popular. This probably reflects the low barrier to entry of creating this kind of product. However, our customers also successfully sell software, audio, pictures and video (or a combination of these).

We have customers that sell tiny house plans, doll clothing patterns, a Jamaican Patois language audio course and dictionary and best-selling indie video games. We also have customers who sell a combination of physical and digital products.

Make money from something you're doing anyway or want to do

We've heard a lot of 'how I got started' stories from our digital sellers. And so many begin the same way:

You started out because you had an itch to scratch. Something you wanted to build because it was bugging you. Or something you wanted to say because it was buzzing around in your head and wouldn't let you sleep.

And then, almost before you knew it, you realised you'd stumbled across an entire business model. One that would let you jack in your job and go solo. Get a better work life balance. Even employ people who share your passion for your products.

You'd become an entrepreneur and you were darned proud of it.

In fact, this is how SendOwl itself got started back in 2010. Our CEO George Palmer wanted to sell an ebook he was writing and was deeply disappointed with the tech solutions on offer. So, as a software developer himself, he started building his own digital delivery service with $50. His ebook never did get finished: but SendOwl has prospered.

Do I need to sell through a third party marketplace like Amazon or iTunes?

Nope. You can also sell digital products direct from your website, blog, sales description page (provided by your digital delivery company), social media or anywhere you can paste a link. However, this is not a zero sum game. If you want to sell through Amazon and sell direct from your website you can.

Sell both direct and through a marketplace

This can particularly make sense in certain scenarios: for example, many indie video game creators aspire to sell through Steam, a major platform for gamers (they have to be given the nod first though). However, a growing minority also sell direct to keep their independence, keep in touch with their audience, and make a lot more money per sale.

In this video, Mark Morris of Introversion Software explains why he sells direct as well as through Steam. Introversion have sold 2 million units of their best-selling game Prison Architect to date:

Even major music studios are getting in on the act

Even major music studios are starting to see the advantage of selling direct rather than through marketplaces like iTunes. Working in conjunction with Shopify, our team have been behind recent digital launches by Kanye West, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails.

You can now buy the latest Radiohead album direct – with some help from Shopify and SendOwl

Advantages of selling direct

keep more of the profits (usually between 90-95% versus about 50-60% for third party marketplaces)
you can sell products in beta and offer free updates (because early-stage customer feedback is more important than perfection)
you can keep in contact with customers and market to them more effectively (it's much easier to sell to an existing customer than a new customer)
you keep your independence (no more changing t&cs and marketing straightjackets)

Challenges of selling direct

you need a website, blog, sales description page or social media account
you need a digital delivery provider to link with your payment processor of choice (PayPal, Stripe, etc), create a conversion-optimised checkout and securely and automatically deliver your product. SendOwl can help with this.
you stand or fall by the quality of your product and your marketing (although your product may never achieve visibility on third party platforms either, despite their huge audience)

Can I really make more money selling products direct?

Let's look at an example: you're an indie games creator selling on average 20 PC games a month at $30 dollars and 50 app games at $6 direct through your website (you plan to sell more!). You also make sales through Steam.

Well, let's say you're spending $24 a month on SendOwl (our third highest plan) and you choose Stripe as your payment processor.

I'm going to create a digital product and sell direct: now what?

Choose a payment gateway

Digital file delivery providers don't usually process payments. This is because, historically, payment processors and ecommerce companies have been separate. Payment processors have needed to be tightly regulated because they are dealing with your money, while ecommerce companies have preferred to sidestep that level of bureaucracy and concentrate on helping you sell more.

So, before you start out with a digital file delivery company you will need to sign up with a payment processor like:

PayPal
Stripe
BitPay
ApplePay
Bancontact
Giropay
iDEAL
SOFORT

Signing up with one of these is usually very easy, but don't rush your decision. Think about what your customers want. If your customers mainly want to pay with debit or credit cards Stripe is a good choice because their customer experience is delightfully quick and easy, and their charges are competitive.

Stripe's Pay as You Go pricing is as follows:

2.9% + 30cents (cheaper if you're in Europe: 1.4%)
No setup, monthly, or hidden fees
Pay only for what you use
Real-time fee reporting
They also have cheaper fees for high volume sellers

See this article for more information.

PayPal's standard business account is as follows:

no monthly fee
You should pay 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction in the US or 3.9% + a fixed fee for all transactions outside the US
multi-user account

See this article for more information.

PayPal does offer card processing, but their checkout is more cumbersome, possible because they really want your customers to sign up for a PayPal account rather than pay and depart.

If your customers don't have easy access to cards, but are super tech-savvy, then BitPay and ApplePay can be be promising options. If they are not super tech-savvy then popular European payment processors like SOFORT are a solid option.

PayPal is a good bet if you have always used them, your customers use them, and you're happy as you are.

Of course, you can always sign up with a few payment processors to make it as easy as possible for customers to give you money in any way they choose.

What does a digital delivery company do?

They do three important jobs in one (at least). These are

linking with your payment processor(s)
providing a secure checkout
ensuring secure and automatic delivery of your files.

Plus:

integrating with all your other software and services
providing no-extra-cost marketing features like gifting, one-click upsells, cart abandonment, Pay what you want pricing, discounts, and so on

We've looked at payment processing. Let's move on to providing a secure checkout, delivering your files and providing marketing features.

Providing a checkout

mobile-optimised so customers can buy on all devices
multi-language so customers can buy all over the world (and where you don't have to provide your own translation!)
streamlined so customers don't abandon carts when asked to provide extra useless information (if you sell digital files you don't even need a name.)
customisable so customers feel comfortable being sent to these pages because they look like the rest of your site
flexible so you can add trust icons, for example, if you think they will increase your conversion rate
accessible so that customers can easily choose to pay how they want

Make sure your checkout is easy to use on mobile

Most providers should give you two options:

add a Buy Now button to your website so your customers can make an instant purchase
add Cart functionality so customers can buy more than one product (wohoot!)

A Buy Now button is best if you have got people on your website or landing page, given them lots of useful information about why they need this one product and then want to encourage them to make a purchase.

Cart functionality works best if you effectively have a shop and need people to be able to browse, add to cart, browse a bit more, add another item to cart, and then checkout.

This website needs Cart functionality because they sell lots of products

Securely deliver your digital file

Once your customer has paid for your product, then your digital file delivery provider should automatically and securely deliver your file to them via a download page that appears straight after checkout, as well as by an email with a download link just in case they want to download later.

Other features to look out for include:

quick download speeds for your customers (preferably from an Edge network: essential if you have bigger files)
time-limited download links which makes them harder to be shared
maximum download attempts (that you can specify), which reduces unauthorised sharing
secure by default digital delivery options (this just means your provider should know what they are doing and shouldn't be offering something cheap/free that isn't really very good)

What price should I charge for my digital product?

$25.56. No, just joking.

This is one of those questions that everyone wants an easy answer to (like: what is the meaning of life: "42" according to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams).

However, it's not usually as simple as that. The price of your product depends on what it is, who your customers are, how much they need your product (do you solve a major problem for them or just a bit of niggle), and many other factors.

These are some basic guidelines about pricing:

price by value to your customer rather than by a race to the bottom
price higher for business to business products (rather than business to consumers, who are usually more price sensitive)
be confident that your product is worth decent money
start higher and consider offering discounts (launch day discounts, Black Friday discounts, etc)
consider offering pricing packages

Let's look at this last one: consider offering pricing packages. This is a good option because:

by offering more expensive options your basic option can look very reasonable: more so than if you offered just this option by itself
you can increase profits by 'add ons', because they usually offer a high profit margin even if fewer people buy them
packages can be fun and useful for your customers! They thought they just wanted your cheapest product, but now they see what else they can have...
packages can appeal to different customer groups

Semplice sell their software to different customer groups at different prices

We do our best to answer the pricing question!

We've typically shied away from giving an answer to the 'pricing' question because it's hard - whatever generalisation we give won't be right for all sellers.

However, we realised that we could extract some useful answers from our SendOwl dataset. After all, we've got thousands of SendOwl sellers getting pricing right.

So, we dived into our database and analysed millions of orders to see what patterns we could spot. Here are our answers.

Single priced products are best sold aimed at the $100-$165 price point
Bundle products are best aimed at $35-$55 with bundles in the range 1.5-5x
You can charge a lot more, or less, than this very successfully - you just have to back up that price point with your product/website/marketing quality

How do I market my product?

Start early

Try and avoid thinking that you must have your product perfect and ready to launch before you mention it to people because:

They might pinch your idea
They won't be interested if it's not perfect
You're just not ready to launch your product on the world

If you have a product that is good quality and you can present yourself as an authoritative and credible source, then people will buy from you, no matter what cheap imitations there might be out there.

People will buy a beta product provided they know that's what they are buying and you present it as an exciting option. Perhaps along the lines of 'be a cool early adopter: only 200 beta downloads for sale at this exclusive price'.

You might also be surprised by what your customers see as worthy of interest: even a basic pitch might get their attention if you touch on a pain point.

And let's face it. You're never really going to be ready to launch your product to the world. You can always prevaricate, edit and tidy your sock draw some more. So stop. Just do it. Launch!

Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving to be our best. Perfectionism is not about healthy achievement and growth; it's a shield. Brene Brown

Get involved with discussions about your subject

Start talking about subjects that relate to your ebook on social media. Keep an eye out for any news articles, or interesting opinion pieces to share in tweets and posts. Don't be afraid to join relevant conversations or to leave a comment on an article that you found really useful.

By participating in this way, you'll get yourself seen by wider audiences, who are likely to be interested in your product, particularly when they see that you're about to solve an issue that has been bugging them for years!

Also, don't discount the value of 'in person' promotion, whether that means lighting talks, meet ups, speaking gigs or conferences. Although these avenues don't scale well, they can give you an early leg up and earn you some good will.

Get an online presence up early

This means you can refer people to your website, blog or social media when you've been talking about your subject. Plus you can even use this to test demand for your product. For example, this website Markdown to PDF is planning to launch a service that converts one type of file format to another: Markdown to PDF. So, first, they let people have a taster of what they do by converting a markdown file to PDF (but not one that contains images – it has to be a basic file). Second, they ask people to sign up to a newsletter to be the first to hear when the product launches.

So they haven't launched yet but already have an idea of actual demand for their product (people who use their beta service) as well as general interest (newsletter signups).

Give away content – and build your newsletter list

Like the example above, consider giving away some of your product as you go. That way people can get excited by what you are doing and sign up for your newsletter.

Consider guest posting

Guest posting is another option for building interest, although it can be tough. Many people will want you to pay for the privilege unless you're a big name that can enhance their reputation. Also be cautious about guest posting just to get a link back to your website to improve your SEO. This tactic is quite difficult to pull off these days and can even backfire if your guest posts are on less credible sites.

Ask for feedback

I learnt the value of this from a friend, whose book was tech reviewed when 50% complete. Not only did he get valuable feedback that made his book tons better, but he also acquired valuable cheerleaders who reviewed his book when it came out and broadcast the news on their networks.

I've also been writing my own ebook and was chuffed to receive this feedback recently from someone I'd asked (rather hopefully) to read it at draft stage:

It was a pleasure to peruse your book. I wish you the best of luck in its publication and sales. I’d be happy to share any promotional text about it on my website and social media networks, if you think that might be helpful.

The offer of help with marketing was entirely unexpected – and very welcome!

Consider getting other people to sell your products for you

This sounds rather lazy, but it's a tried and tested marketing strategy. To do this professionally, though, you need to set up an affiliate scheme. Basically, you recruit people who will promote your product in exchange for a % cut of the profits. All the details are agreed between you and formalised.

Affiliate schemes are used by sellers of all sizes to increase sales and reach customers they wouldn't otherwise have found. Even large companies like Amazon use affiliates to find new customers and boost sales

Even Amazon use affiliates – and they've got a pretty big marketing department of their own

You agree to pay affiliates a % of sales, so the more products they help you sell, the more money they earn. You can reward successful affiliates with a % boost in their commission rates, if they achieve a certain sales goal. You can also offer different % rates for different products, depending on their value and marketability.

Just make sure that they are a good fit for your business. You probably don't want your product advertised next to some dodgy advert about male enhancement.

SendOwl seller Daniel Gold, founder of productivity website DEG Consulting, found that the setting up an affiliate network enabled him to do these three things:

1) leverage other people who are passionate about my products and services to their followers while at the same time earning a passive revenue stream for themselves

2) increase my market share in the productivity space as a result of my affiliates; and

3) create a passive income revenue stream for myself.

Sounds good! Some digital delivery companies, like SendOwl, offer an in-built affiliate scheme.

Don't forget your pre-launch email sequence

By planning a pre-launch sequence, you can extract the most value from your email list. During the sequence you build excitement about your product so your readers are eager to get their hands on it when it's released.

A pre-launch sequence involves sending out a series of emails over a 7-10 day period about your product launch. Aim for about 5 emails. Hopefully you've been keeping in contact with your list regularly so they won't be too surprised by your email.

Initially, just let people know you've got an upcoming product as part of a more general mail out, and then build anticipation and send out emails more regularly as the launch date approaches. Focus more on the product you're about to launch with your latter emails.

Make sure you write about how your product will benefit your readers, rather than listing features or doing a hard sell. Consider offering a sneak-peak or an instant takeaway that offers the reader value. For tips on how to read emails people actually want to read try this blog post by customer.io. MailChimp also have plenty of resources to help you send better emails.

And make sure you do a quick test with a short email list (you and a friend) in advance to avoid a last minute panic.

Don't forget no-spend marketing options

As soon as you think about marketing the odds are you start to think about adverts and social media and emails and landing pages and... goodness knows what else.

However, don't forget slightly less obvious marketing options like:

one-click upsells: you ask a customer before or after checkout whether they would also like to buy something else, perhaps at a discount
discounts: you promise money off your regular price
Pay what you want pricing (PWYWP): you let your customers decide what to pay you, although you can set a minimum price
gifting: you make it easy for your customers buy products for friends and family as a gift
cart abandonment: you try and get customers who have completed part of the checkout to actually buy your product

Upsells can make you between 4-20% extra revenue with no extra marketing spend

These options make it more likely that customers will be interested in your product ("oooh, 20% off!"), will convert ("I want to buy a birthday present – oh good, I can gift this") and will buy more ("do I want this extra video for only $5...go on then).

For more marketing advice try:

How can I improve my conversion rate and increase revenue?

There's no point working hard to get people to your website or blog if they then leave almost immediately because of your poor content or your poor checkout experience.

Here are a few tips to boost your on-site conversion rate:

Tip number 1: make sure people know why they should buy your product
Tip number 2: Use video or images to bolster your story
Tip number 3: Make sure your website doesn't contain either distractions or important omissions that stop people buying
Tip number 4: Make sure your calls to action are obvious enough
Tip number 5: Make sure your website looks good on mobiles
Tip number 6: make sure your website loads quickly

Your site visitors want to find the answers to key questions on your website. Don't make them hunt for it! [photo credit ]

For more detail, have a look at our blog post on How to improve your conversion rate, part 1.

Here are a few tips to boost your checkout conversion rate:

Tip number 1: Prepare your customer for checkout and what to expect
Tip number 2: Reassure your customer about security
Tip number 3: Customize your checkout
Tip number 4: Make sure you have a clear pricing strategy up front
Tip number 5: Offer different checkout options
Tip number 6: Recover lost sales

Try and tempt back customers who look like they might be jumping ship

For more detail, have a look at our blog post on How to improve your conversion rate, part 2.

What about theft, fraud and hacking?

First off, stay cool. Most people will want to give you money and be nice. Don't penalise them through heavy-handed security measures because of the actions of a minority.

However, there are sensible precautions you can take including:

If you sell PDFs then make sure you enable PDF stamping. This means adding a visual watermark to whichever pages you choose. This visual watermark usually includes your buyer's name, email address and an order ID at the bottom of the page (you can stamp all pages or just certain ones). So you can see who the PDF was originally sold to and deduce whether they are 'sharing' it in a way that you're not happy with.
Consider selling access to streamed videos rather than a download option, which usually makes them easier to pirate. Companies like Netflix have made streaming a popular and acceptable option, although your customers will need a decent internet connection.
Add license keys to software and games to stop people sharing the download link.

You want to make sure your product is as secure as possible, without penalising legitimate customers [credit]

General security precautions also include:

Keep your digital delivery account secure with two-factor authentication. This means that it is much less likely your account will get hacked, even if someone gains access to your email.
Choose good passwords for your online accounts! Services like 1Password mean you only ever need remember one password – and then they generate super secure passwords when needed (we require all our SendOwl team to use 1Password, for security).
Make sure your digital delivery provider offers time-limited downloads and max download attempts to deter unauthorised sharing. Also make sure they take security seriously and know what they are doing.
Block block buyers by email address, IP address or region if they are behaving in a dodgy way
Request a takedown from Google if links to a pirated version of your product start to appear on the first page of Google instead of your genuine product

Consider enabling two-factor authentication to keep your important accounts secure

I've got one of two products doing well – but how can I turn this into a business?

Launch products that complement each other and target a similar audience. For example, fitness website Impossible HQ started out with their product Impossible Abs ("Burn FAT. KILL your excuses and get Six Pack Abs IN ONLY 8 WEEKS. Without hours of cardio work or EVER stepping in a gym.") They now sell The No Excuse Workout and Cold Shower Therapy as well.
Scale what does work – and you can do this by bootstrapping, which means you grow the business through reinvesting profits rather than by external funding. You don't need millions of dollars in investment (although you can go after it if you want of course). Here are some successful bootstrapped companies. courtesy of 37Signals (themselves bootstrapped).
Don't be afraid to pivot if your original plan isn't working but your customers love one aspect of your product, are using it in different ways to the one you intended, or your key audience hate it but another group entirely and unexpectedly loves it. You might still find yourself with a viable and interesting business. Plus you'll have a much more interesting 'about us' story than someone who came up with a 5 year plan and stuck to it!

Bootstrapping can be a good way to scale without giving away control of your company

Checklist for selling digital products

Research market for your digital product
Begin creating product
Begin marketing your product
Ask for feedback
Research payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal (and many more)
Research ways to sell your product
Take those options for a test drive (SendOwl offers a 30 day free trial) and sign up.
Keep working on product
Plan and execute email launch sequence
Finish product (or launch as beta)
Launch
Analyse and improve conversion rate
Analyse most successful and least successful marketing channels – do more of the former
Plan next product that will help you grow your business

See all our features

Episode 12 - With Joe Pulizzi - Content marketing for digital entrepreneurs

2017-06-21T09:06:12Z

Moving your audience from follower to subscriber to buyer

Joe Pulizzi is the founder of Content Marketing Institute, a UBM company, the leading education and training organization for content marketing, which includes the largest in-person content marketing event in the world, Content Marketing World. Joe is the winner of the 2014 John Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Content Council. Joe’s the author of five books, including his latest, Killing Marketing coming September 2017. His third book, Epic Content Marketing was named one of “Five Must Read Business Books of 2013” by Fortune Magazine. You can find Joe on Twitter @JoePulizzi. If you ever see Joe in person, he’ll be wearing orange.

Is Joe Pulizzi the reason why all marketing companies make their brand color orange? Joe won’t take credit for it!

Considering digital entrepreneurs, why should they be concerned with content marketing? - 3:30

I think the best way to build a business today is through a content marketing approach.

Create valuable and compelling content like a media company would, and then sell them something once they are engaged. There are no barriers to entry today to build an audience. There’s more clutter, sure, but there’s more access to an audience today.

The best thing to do is to focus on the needs and pain points of a particular audience. If you focus on meeting those needs, you can sell them whatever you want. All that we do at Content Marketing Institute is to meet the pain points of our audience, and we can monetize it in many different ways.

If you are like most entrepreneurs, you come up with a product and try to sell it to an audience, and then you are forced to pivot when it’s not working and sell to a different audience. The other way to do it is to find an audience that has a need, and then fulfill that need in that niche. Grow the relationship and sell new things. That’s where I think the opportunity is today for entrepreneurs. It’s a lot less risky.

Loot Crate is a company that sends boxes to comic book nerds and geeks. The customers don’t have any idea what is in the box, but they keep buying it because it shows up on the doorstep with random things that they love. It’s a subscription.

If you want to do something in 6 months then content marketing is not for you. I would suggest that you do advertising if you want a quick impact. But content marketing is the long game that works as you build a loyal following.

We like to push people to our newsletter. I find that having a good email list is the most valuable subscription. We do all the other things also like YouTube and Facebook and Twitter. If people engage on all of our platforms, they become better customers. But remember, it takes a long time to get that data.

What do you say to people who want to start to calculate the ROI of content marketing from the beginning of the process? - 11:00

If you have 6 months and you’re asking, “what return can I see?” Don’t do content marketing. This is about building a loyal relationship with a group of people over time. You can’t rush that. It takes between 12 and 24 months to see real impact.

Let’s say that the core of your program is a newsletter. That’s your call to action. When you get that subscriber list, you can compare that to your customer database and see who is buying.

Then you can start to measure: -Do they close faster? -Do they buy more stuff? -Do they talk more favorably about me online?

Somebody that subscribes to our newsletter and also two other social channels. They are our absolute best customers. They spend the most with us, they go to Content Marketing World. They buy everything we’ve got.

We have one subscription option that is there to open the door. And then we have other elements of the process to close business.

Our buying cycle is 9 to 12 months. If you’re buying cycle is 9 to 12 months and you want results in 6 months, good luck!

Can you give me an example of a company that you know who is primarily selling online who has a rocking content strategy? - 14:20

One of my really good friends, Brian Clark, started CopyBlogger. He started in 2006 and had the idea that people would want to learn online copywriting. They need tips on how to get found in search, etc. Organic, not advertising. Back in 2006 he started this and for 19 months he blogged 5 times per week. They had an e-newsletter that people could sign up for.

Over that 19 months he got to know his audience. He generated over 100,000 opt-in subscribers to his newsletter. Now really what they sell is a content management system focused on SEO. He started selling it in the late 2000s, and they’re one of the fastest growing SaaS companies. 90% of his revenue comes through someone who build a newsletter first. Now people buy is stuff. He’s well over a $10,000,000 company.

He put a team together, started blogging, and now he’s there!

So you’re saying 5 times per week for 19 months straight. Is there such a thing as posting so much content that you overwhelm your audience? - 17:00

First of all, our goal is not to create more content. We want to create the minimum amount of content for the maximum amount of results.

Think about yourself. If it’s really valuable you won’t say “I don’t really want another piece of valuable content.”

Now, if you are creating content 5 times per week and 2 are good but 3 are not, you’ve got a problem. Everything you create needs to make an impact.

Think to yourself, what can we do really great with the resources I have?

It might be one post per week, it might be one post per month. Figure out what you can do, where you will do it, and then think about your velocity last.

Now is a great time to own the email newsletter space because so many people are so bad at it.

But remember, you’re competing with everyone in your industry, Google, Amazon, and everyone else. So, you need to focus on a niche and do it better than anyone else.

Find a micro-niche that’s not being covered very well and you have a big opportunity there.

Are there any new marketing channels opening up that are a content goldmine or any that are on their dieing leg? - 24:20

I have a subscription hierarchy. At the top are email and print. I get data, information, and control from these subscriptions.

All the way at the bottom is a Facebook fan. It makes me feel good but doesn’t do anything for by business. But I’m always trying to move people into my email list.

The thing about social media today is that Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are the ABC, NBC, and CBS of our time. They own the connections, not you. But they’re great advertising channels. Facebook is a fantastic advertising site. You can reach a lot of people over a certain keyword.

Organic reach on Facebook is terrible. It gets less than 1% reach. Buzzfeed built their entire audience on Facebook, then Facebook changed their distribution rules and Buzzfeed has been forced to find other methods.

What’s the best way to get someone to move from being a social subscriber to being a newsletter subscriber? - 28:30

For people who sign up to follow you on a social channel, turn on advertising and push them to sign up for your email list.

Even on YouTube, take Jimmy Fallon for example, you can verbally tell people to subscribe to your newsletter.

You have to create compelling calls to action that push people into the next step.

Is it better to spend a lot of time creating a polished piece of content, or is better to get it out quick and dirty and fast as possible? - 31:50

If it’s quick and dirty and super valuable I’m fine with it. Ever heard of Kevin Kelly? His blog is just text. You would be lucky to get a picture. But the content is great.

Seth Godin has blogged every day for 20 years. It’s a type blog with an RSS feed that goes to newsletter. He’s done pretty well with that.

Whatever works, but the content has to be good, valuable, interesting, targeted. The flash and bang is secondary.

Are you seeing any trends about short-form or long-form content? - 35:00

It depends on what your audience wants. We have two podcasts. One is an hour, one is five minutes. They’re both successful but it’s a different audience.

Years ago people made all the content short because they thought people didn’t have attention spans. But people can sit and binge watch Game of Thrones today. So people have time. It’s all about value and interest.

For me I like a 45-minute podcast because I listen while I’m running and that’s about how long I’m out for. So the length doesn’t matter much.

How can people contact you? - 38:50

ContentMarketingInstitute.com Content Marketing World @JoePulizzi

I will respond but maybe not in the first 48 hours!

Additional Resources

Digital sellers have made over $1/4 billion through SendOwl

How to choose a digital download service

Episode 11 - Why the time to be a digital entrepreneur is now!

2017-05-31T10:30:26Z

Tell me more about you.

I’m originally from Memphis TN. I went to college at a school in Birmingham Alabama. Then I spent a few years puttering around. I became a freelance interpreter. I taught English in Brazil. I moved back to Memphis and worked for a digital marketing agency for a year. Then I worked for an ecommerce company for a few years. I started doing consulting for different ecommerce companies helping them with marketing, systems, and processes.

At that time, I had my own blog which I was working on as a side project. I would process whatever I learned in a week and I kept a record of that on my blog every Saturday morning.

Then I decided to write a book based on those experiences. I didn’t know what the implications of online business were at that point in time.

My book, The End of Jobs, is a way of articulating the online entrepreneur’s “script” or trajectory.

Tell me about mental models.

You would have looked at the world through a kaleidoscope at some point, right? The way that you twist that kaleidoscope makes the perspective change.

In life, everyone sees the world differently. So, you can shake up your “lens” and see the world in a different way.

Entrepreneurs look at the same reality that everyone else sees but they realize the opportunity differently. We have the ability to rewire our brains and do this.

In the book The End of Jobs, in the first section we talk about globalization and the rise of machines. From the year 2000 to 2010 there were more college graduates than at any other time in history. Now, educated people are very easy to access. Now, people are competing globally, not just locally. You can see this as a threat or as an opportunity.

As an entrepreneur, today you can find the very best talent in the world, hire them, and work with them from anywhere in the world if you have a reliable internet connection.

You say that entrepreneurship won’t be around forever. What do you mean by that?

Western history falls into four eras -Agricultural -Industrial -Knowledge -Entrepreneurial

When Rockefeller started his factory, that was the right time to start a factory.

When Bill Gates started Microsoft or when Thomas Watson started IBM, that was the right time to start a knowledge company. The people were the real asset during this time.

Now we are seeing a shift from what we consider knowledge work to entrepreneurial work.

There is a commoditization of traditional knowledge work. There is a supply and demand curve happening. There are lots of lawyers but the demand isn’t increasing very fast. The ability to look at the reality and see something differently as an entrepreneur does, that is still a scarce resource.

Consider startup costs today also. If you wanted to start a software company 15 years ago, you needed a lot of capital because of the cost of server space. The costs have come down so fast that you can now start easier.

Would you recommend to graduates that they should go after starting their own business?

That’s the general idea.

A lot of people who end up lawyers don’t do it because they have a deep abiding love of the law. But they’re doing it to make a good income.

I ask people, how can you start to add an entrepreneurial component to what you are already doing?

You can take an entrepreneurial view of legal practices for example and be very successful at that. You can be a very entrepreneurial accountant if you develop a new way of looking at budgeting and forecasting for ecommerce companies, as an example.

What if I feel overwhelmed with responsibilities. How do I move forward with my idea when I feel stuck?

When I talk to people who feel stuck it’s not necessarily that there’s a logistical problem. Usually it’s an issue with emotional work.

There’s a book called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. He calls this idea “The Resistance.” It’s the difference between a role where you are ticking all the boxes and one where you have to go out and make something. Most people won’t like your idea at first.

I have a friend who was more terrified of pressing publish on a blog post than patrolling Iraq during the war. We are hardwired to not upset the status quo and it can be scary to do so. But like Elon Musk from our example earlier, he upset the status quo and it paid off well.

The second component is the logistical angle. If you are younger and have less responsibilities it’s obviously easier to become an entrepreneur.

One of my mentors said to me that it takes 1000 days of working on whatever your idea is to get it to a point where it can replace your full-time job. That means 1000 days of no weddings, no barbecues. That’s the tradeoff. A lot of people don’t want to make that tradeoff.

There are a lot of people who went for an MBA but now they are stuck doing something completely unrelated to business. Why do you think MBA students get stuck when it comes to entrepreneurship? They have degrees in business, right?

I think MBAs prepare you very well to succeed at mid and upper level management of large corporations. My understanding from people I talk to is that MBAs are quite good at that. What MBAs are not, “How to start a small business.”

You reference this idea called “the return of apprenticeships.” What is this idea? How do you see it unfolding?

The first school was to take kids and teach them to be normal so they could be put into factories so they could do this consistent repetitive work. Schools even look industrial. And that’s how most schools still work. To train you to work in businesses.

In an apprenticeship, you would learn a trade from a master. A blacksmith knows how to make swords and his apprentice would learn how to do that as well. People who decide to learn in an environment that mimics apprenticeship will have a much better chance at being a successful entrepreneur than going to a school which trains them to be a desk clerk.

Now what we are seeing is that people are deciding to take a “low-paying entry level job” at a startup to learn everything they can in a few years instead of going to a university for the same amount of time.

How can people leverage the internet to start a side hustle or something new?

If you have a job right now then you have some skillset that someone is willing to pay you for. Can you leverage that into something more entrepreneurial?

The other thing is side projects. Can you take your existing skillset now and spin it up into some sort of entrepreneurial side project? So many of these online businesses are extremely easy to start right now. Something like selling digital products online is very feasible.

What’s a problem you have in your own life? What are you spending money on? What sectors do you understand? Can you launch something in that space in less than 7 days?

Is there something you can get off the ground quickly for a first project just to get your feet wet? Something where you are scratching your own itch?

You mentioned selling digital products online. I came across your book online and I came to realize that you are using SendOwl to sell copies from your website. So, you have managed to execute this concept in your own business. How did you come up with the idea to write a book and publish it from your own site?

The founders of the company that I used to work for have an annual conference. I was at that conference sitting around the breakfast buffet with a bunch of guys in their late 20s and 30s. We were all talking about how hard it is to go back and explain to your friends exactly what it is you do.

The idea from the book was born out of the conversation, “how can I explain what I do to my mom?”

Who should read your book?

The book is aimed at people who are either thinking about starting an online business, or they’ve started it and they are trying to find a way to rationalize the decision. A lot of people need the book to help explain to their spouse why they are starting their own thing. It helps people who are making the leap or they’ve made it and they’re trying to wrap their heads around it.

If listeners want to learn more where can they go?

TaylorPearson.me

If you are interested in apprenticeship positions you can find more at my other website getapprenticeship.com

Additional Resources

Digital sellers have made over $1/4 billion through SendOwl

How to choose a digital download service

Your new digital delivery checkout: Stage 1 of the radical overhaul is now complete!

2017-05-30T15:04:41Z

Since the start of the year we've been working on a radical overhaul of the SendOwl checkout. Although our checkout converts really well, we know that our customers want more flexibility, more payment options and precise insights into how they can increase their conversion rate. So, we've put our heads together and have come up with something pretty revolutionary in the world of digital delivery. Wohoot! We're delighted (and slightly exhausted) to announce that stage 1 of our radical checkout overhaul is now complete.

Before we move on to what's new we should say there's absolutely no need to move to the new checkout. The old style checkout is still available and you can choose between the two.

Choice of payment options on pay page

Your customers can now choose which payment method they prefer on the pay page. This keeps your sales funnel as simple and flexible as possible.

Customers can also enter discount codes on the pay page.

Support for the main European payment methods

Customers in European countries such as Belgium, Holland and Germany often don't want to pay using Visa or Mastercard. In fact, many don't have access to them.

Instead they want to use payments methods such as Bancontact in Belgium, Giropay in Germany, iDEAL in Holland and SOFORT in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain.

60% of consumers [in Holland] used iDEAL to pay for their most recent purchase

Bancontact had 27 million online transactions in 2015

SOFORT has processed more than 150 million successful transactions

SendOwl now supports all these payment methods through Stripe. Better still, if your customer is in Belgium, for instance, then our checkout will automatically show the Belgium payment method first, as well as any other payment methods you've enabled.

We're expecting a real up-tick in conversions from customers based in these European countries. We've certainly had plenty of requests from our sellers in these countries so we're excited to see what effect it has.

Added popups for PayPal transactions

PayPal transactions are never going to take the prize for ease of use. However, PayPal remains extremely popular so we're working on making PayPal transactions as easy as possible.

Customers paying with PayPal can now enter their details in a pop up window rather than go through the journey that is a PayPal redirect.

We think this will be a real boost for non-techy buyers who can easily get lost/confused in the PayPal redirect.

Putting card numbers and expiry dates on one line

Okay, this is a tiny change. But it is tiny changes that can increase conversion rates and make you more money. We think that by making your checkout look even easier to fill in (by combining the three credit card fields into one) then fewer people will abandon their cart. The minimum fields required to buy your products is now just an email and credit card numbers, so even the laziest of buyers should get through without giving up.

Address improvements

Previously you could only record one address per order. We've now split that out so shipping and billing addresses are handled separately. This is great for physical good sellers who want to record a billing address as well.

Note: if you're using shipping_ address fields (shipping_address1, shipping_country etc) in any liquid objects (eg emails, web hooks) then you'll need to change those over to billing_ fields (eg billing_address1, billing_country) if the address you request is a billing one. Contact support if you require more information on this.

Mobile enhancements

This is really a large series of small changes, but we're polished our checkout user interface on mobiles to make sure it's as lovely and easy to use as possible.

Improving upsells

Want to offer upsells from a free product? Or sell a free tangible item where only postage is payable? Both these cases are now possible due to the payment method being chosen on the final screen. Great for those who pursue the "give something away free and then upsell" model.

Retina images

We've added retina images so customers on high resolution screens (like modern phones, tablets and some laptops) will see higher quality images. We've even provided these up to 4x the standard resolution so in a few years time when super high resolution screens come on the market, we've already got you covered. We love to think ahead.

Switching to the new checkout

Head to Settings -> Checkout in SendOwl and change the checkout in the Dropdown. The new checkout is available immediately but please be aware if you've made any customisations to the previous checkout then check they're still working on the new version.

What's next?

These checkout highlights should help you boost your conversion rate as they make it even easier for your customers - wherever they are located or however they want to pay – to give you money.

But that's all for now, folks. We'll be in touch in the coming months with plenty more good news.

Learn more about SendOwl

Use Stripe for credit and debit card processing – and grow your digital product business

2017-05-30T13:18:25Z

If you want to sell digital products direct from your website or social media then you need to choose a payment method for your customers. So why not try Stripe? They make it easy and affordable for you to set up debit and credit card processing for your digital products business. Here at SendOwl, we've partnered with Stripe since they launched in 2011. We could see from the start how good they were and that their values of ease of use, simplicity and innovation aligned with ours. Stripe now helps power 100,000+ businesses in 100+ countries.

Stripe offers value for money

Stripe's Pay as You Go pricing is as follows:

2.9% + 30cents (cheaper if you're in Europe)
No setup, monthly, or hidden fees
Pay only for what you use
Real-time fee reporting

They also have cheaper fees for high volume sellers.

Stripe is easy to integrate with your digital delivery provider

Although Stripe helps you accept payment from your customers they don't sort out digital delivery. So you'll need to sign up with a digital delivery company to arrange this service (and digital delivery companies like SendOwl do heaps of other stuff as well, such as providing built in marketing features such as one-click upsells and cart abandonment).

Don't worry about connecting Stripe with SendOwl though. It's really easy. You simply enter your Stripe API keys in SendOwl's Payment Gateways section, select 'update' and job done. If you don't know what an API key is it doesn't matter. There is a link in Stripe's main menu and you only need to cut and paste.

You don't just have to choose Stripe when you sign up with SendOwl

Here at SendOwl we partner with PayPal, ApplePay, BitPay and Authorize.net. So you can choose which payment method – or methods – you prefer. In 2017 we also launched support for extremely popular European payment options such as Bancontact, Giropay, iDEAL and SOFORT.

We'll continue to embrace new options that offer our sellers a more productive and cost effective way to do something. We were the first digital delivery company to offer ApplePay, for example.

We don't offer payment processing in-house because it is a highly regulated market which needs specialist expertise. If we offered this option in house it would be nowhere near as good as Stripe, for example, so we'd be fools to even try!

As it is, we selectively partner with some amazing companies in payment processing, email automation, membership software, and many more areas, and make it as easy as possible for you to link accounts. We think this offers you the best customer experience possible: a coalition of great partners that all work together to help support you.

Learn more

How to Sell Digital Goods Through Paypal

2017-04-18T11:10:17Z

PayPal is a trusted brand used by 192 million people, so it's a good choice if you want to sell digital goods and need a reliable payment gateway. But what do you need to do to get selling? In this article we outline a few simple steps that will get your digital goods business off to a flying start with PayPal.

Sell digital goods with PayPal in 4 easy steps

Sign up for a PayPal business or premier account
Arrange automatic and secure delivery of digital goods
Add buy now button or paste link in social media
Make some tweaks to your sales process to sell more

1. Get started with PayPal

If you don't already have a PayPal account then sign up for one. They make it very easy. If you already have a personal account, you'll need a Business or Premier account to sell.

premier account

Suitable for both buying and selling. Make secure payments on eBay and merchant websites. Plus, accept credit card, debit card, and bank account payments.

no monthly fee
You should pay 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction in the US or 3.9% + a fixed fee for all transactions outside the US

standard business account

Targeted at businesses. Accept credit card, debit card and bank account payments.

no monthly fee
You should pay 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction in the US or 3.9% + a fixed fee for all transactions outside the US
multi-user account

payments pro account

Targeted at volume sellers.

$30 per month
advanced features
you provide customers with a customized checkout experience on your site
includes Virtual Terminal to allow you to accept payments over the phone
you should pay 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction in the US or 3.9% + a fixed fee for all transactions outside the US

Micropayment Fee Structure

Suitable if you sell low priced products

available for goods under $10
reduces fees
contact PayPal to apply for this rate

Please note that PayPal charges may vary. Please check the PayPal website for the most recent information.

2. Arrange automatic and secure delivery of digital goods

PayPal won't deliver your goods for you

Although PayPal will act as your payment gateway, they won't deliver your digital products for you.

It is possible for you to manually email your digital product to everyone who buys it, but this isn't ideal. Buyers want their product immediately and you'll push up against email and file sharing limits as well as security issues. You also waste a lot of time that could be better spent creating new digital goods.

Consider signing up with a digital delivery company

So, instead of manually sending digital products to individual customers, consider signing up with a digital delivery service that integrates with PayPal. Then, delivery of your digital products can be automated, saving you countless time.

There are a few free apps around that offer digital delivery with PayPal integration. I won't list them because many don't last very long. However, they are an option if you are very price sensitive and want a basic digital delivery service.

If you are serious about growing your digital goods business then take a few established digital delivery companies for a test drive (most should offer a free trial).

They'll make sure your product isn't fraudulently ripped off through features such as PDF stamping and secure time-limited delivery.

Plus they make it super easy for you to get selling. Think 60 seconds if you sign up with a company like SendOwl.

Integrate PayPal with your digital delivery company

This sounds painful: it really shouldn't be. With digital delivery company SendOwl, for example, all you have to do is enter your PayPal-registered email address during onboarding. That's it. You're done.

3. Add buy now button, add to cart button, or paste link in social media

Choose your call to action

If you have one product that you want people to buy direct from your website then add a Buy Now button.

If you have a number of products then an Add to Cart button will work better. That way you can encourage customers to buy multiple products.

If you make effective use of social media or newsletters then consider sending people straight to a sales description page.

If you have an engaged audience who just need a quick reminder to buy, then adding a link to a Tweet or Facebook message that sends people straight to your checkout can be really effective.

No technical knowledge required

To add a buy now/add to cart button to your website requires very little or no technical knowledge, particularly if you are using a DIY website service like Wix, Weebly or Squarespace.

If someone else has built your site and updates it for you, then you will need to contact them. But be aware that adding a button is VERY EASY so shouldn't take them more than 5 minutes.

4. Make some tweaks to your sales process to sell more

It's immensely satisfying when people start buying your digital goods. However, it takes a lot of work to get an interested person to your website (or blog or social media) so you want to do everything you can to get them to make a purchase – or preferably a few purchases!

Try these tactics:

Set up one-click upsells to encourage people to buy more than one of your products

Experiment with discounts and Pay What You Want Pricing both of which can be effective marketing strategies
Rescue abandoned carts with exit pop ups and retargeting campaigns

Try out PayPal Express, which has a more modern checkout flow that should convert better

AND...

Our free gift to you

We know that improving your conversion rate can be challenging so we've put together a two-part guide that will get you results – fast. In this free guide on How to Improve your Conversion Rate we look at:

5 x simple tips to get more people to your website or blog
8 x essential tactics to get more people through checkout

Download free conversion guide now

Episode 10 - Matt Farah's brilliant hustle to make money on YouTube with The Smoking Tire

2017-05-18T12:46:03Z

Today I’m talking with Matt Farah, Chief Editor at The Smoking Tire. If you have ever searched for a car on YouTube, you would have come across his channel The Smoking Tire. He’s been reviewing cars on YouTube for over 10 years. Matt has a combined social following of almost 2 million across platforms. He knows how to hustle to make money on YouTube. Today he’s going to show us what it’s like to follow your passion and start a digital business.

We'll learn valuable lessons for all entrepreneurs while answering the question, "How did Matt Farah build The Smoking Tire and make money on YouTube?"

This podcast is hosted by SendOwl, the digital sales and delivery application helping entrepreneurs to sell digital products, memberships, subscriptions, and even physical products online – anywhere you can paste a link.

Guess what? SendOwl just crossed $250,000,000 in customer sales!

3:00 – Tell me more about The Smoking Tire

Well I grew up pretty much obsessed with cars. I used to drag race in high school. I thought it would be cool to be one of the guys that could write for the magazines, but that’s a job that only like 4 people in the world have.

I bounced around from car job to car job. I started a driving club. I owned a car wash. I learned my way around the business by doing.

I decided when YouTube launched in 2006 that we should make videos of the drives. That was my first foray into making videos with my partner Tom Morningstar. That turned into me getting an actual job at this very early multi-channel network. They hired me to make a show based on cars because of what we did in our silly little videos. That’s something that will never happen again in history. I got lucky because I wasn’t very good at making videos but someone was willing to pay me for my time to do it.

We wanted to continue making videos and so Tom and I moved to California where we could make videos year-round without weather issues. We started The Smoking Tire in 2009.

A very successful YouTube channel can sustain one person in LA. I have like 4 jobs now and The Smoking Tire is one of them.

7:30 - You have a huge following of over a million people collectively. How does it feel?

It’s like a little tap into the world of being a celebrity but it’s also kind of isolating. I can go to a car show and I know that I will be a celebrity there. But I can go to a mall and nobody knows who I am. It’s nice to be able to choose the time and place to be a celebrity.

Unlike a real celebrity, like a movie star, people will come up and talk to you like they’ve known you for a very long time. Many times, I think, “Do I know this person?” “Should I know this person?” “Have I forgotten this person?”

But I still feel like I’m at the beginning. I feel like I’m at the bottom to middle of my climb, not the middle to top.

10:00 - You graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. You started posting on YouTube in 2006. At what point did you realize that you could build a business with your passion?

My dad taught me that if you need money, you have to do what you have to do to get that money. But, if you’re young and you have the time, you should try to turn your passion into your business. It’s very easy to get complacent and wind up with a mortgage or a wife or kid that might keep you from taking the kind of risks that you need to take to be successful with your passion.

Let me be clear, I do come from a place of moderate privilege. I had advantages that other people didn’t have. I’m aware of that. I’m not sorry for it. It just is what it is. What I am saying is that if you come from a little bit of a cushion I could afford to be a little risky with my business decisions knowing that if it all went down I wouldn’t be living in a cardboard box. Know that I had that ability, it was helpful for me to get into this.

Having an online business is just like having any other business with a storefront. You can’t just do it in your free time. You need to commit.

So, when the company in New York went under I sold my half of the car wash and I sold one of my cars and we used that money to run The Smoking Tire for two years.

You need to really commit financially and with sweaty palms. You must find a way to crank out content. You can’t push through that wall unless you push hard. Until you have like 200,000 subscribers you’re making like no money.

15:00 - You drive some of the best cars in the world. How do you get these cars in your hands, and what advice do you have for entrepreneurs who need resources that are owned by other people?

Most people when they email me and they say “how do I do what you do,” they don’t actually want to know that… They want to know how to get the cars.

But what happened is this: I developed a reputation over a very long period of time of being a responsible person. Now if you watch my videos and see me out there driving fast or whatever, you may call that irresponsible but I have a reputation of giving people their cars back in exactly the condition they were given to me. And if something does happen I take responsibility for it.

A lot of business is taking on responsibility and risk. I’ve stepped up immediately and taken responsibility for things. It’s a reputation that takes a very long time to build.

When I get a press car from a manufacturer it’s great because I get to spend a lot of time with each car. It helps me get an in-depth review. Press cars come with insurance, so God-forbid that I smash a press car into a wall, as long as I am not negligent that car is covered under an insurance policy.

But, if I’m driving a personally owned car, any time that I get into somebody’s car I have to be prepared to write a check for the value of that car.

People who are getting started in this industry don’t realize that or don’t have the stomach for that.

And the thing is that a YouTube video only makes a couple hundred bucks. I’m looking to make a couple hundred bucks against a risk that could be in six figures. That’s a stupid thing to do for a job! Mostly people would say “why would you do that?” It’s because I love the job.

If I wrecked a car, fortunately I wouldn’t be living in a cardboard box. But if you don’t have the resources to write a check you shouldn’t be in this business.

21:30 - How much time did it take to generate revenue after your first YouTube upload?

I was fortunate because I had a contact at YouTube. Back then you had to apply to be a partner. Now there’s no vetting process. But back then I emailed my contact at YouTube and I told him what I was doing.

We were partners from day 1 so I got lucky there. We were making money immediately but it was pennies. It was two years before we had anything resembling more than a couple hundred bucks a month.

The Smoking Tire in its current state with 700,000 subscribers will support one person living in LA. Not two. One person in a middle-class LA lifestyle. But I want to be rich! And that’s why I hustle harder than anyone else in this business. That’s why I make more videos and why I studied how the YouTube algorithm works and how I can maximize the profitability for this business.

I’ve had to keep other side jobs. I do voice over. I host and product for other YouTube channels on an independent contract basis. I write columns. I have a television show on NBC sports. I do a podcast. This is all going on concurrently.

The Hollywood hustle is having an oil drum of a bank account with 20 hoses in it that are all on trickle. It’s about keeping all those hoses trickling all the time and that adds up to a lot. It can be stressful because you have to fragment your time across various gigs.

A car isn’t a movie ticket or a set of batteries. It’s not a cheap thing. People take what I say very seriously. It’s very important that I say what I really think. And when I go to my grave I want to be able to say that what you heard in that review is what I really thought.

28:00 - How do you stay so consistent with your content?

From 2009 to 2013 we tried very hard to make television on the internet. We were not happy with the level of TV programming in America about cars. We made well produced pieces that would be TV quality. While we were growing an audience, I wasn’t a good businessman and I wasn’t doing math.

We would do a video and bring in 500,000 views and it would be like $600 but we would have spent 40 hours on it.

I was hanging out with these video game guys who publish their videos on the internet, picture in picture. These guys make a ton of money going straight from their x-box to YouTube. I thought “there’s no way I can do that.” Because I needed editing, and good cameras, and everything else.

But they said, “Why do you need all that?” And that’s when I realized that I didn’t need to make TV on the internet, just to make internet on the internet. And I stripped everything out of the video and worked backwards.

So, I removed the camera men, the sound guy, editing. I started doing picture in picture with a real car. It was like Twitch but with a car. Now it takes 90 minutes to do one video instead of 40 hours. I can do between 4-6 of them per day. I have never had to ask for cars since. I can air videos every Monday through Thursday and now I have a stash of 50 unaired videos. So, I don’t have to touch content for six weeks.

I put out more content than MotorTrend by myself. And now my videos are actually profitable, which almost nobody on YouTube in the auto space can say.

The content gets the same amount of views no matter how good or bad the technical presentation of the content is. You just have to do the math correctly.

34:30 - I saw you had a degree in Fine Arts Photography and I was going to ask you about the creative art matters for YouTube but it sounds like it doesn’t matter much.

I always loved photography as a passion which is why my chosen media platform is Instagram. But I graduated the same year that the first DSLR came out. So, I spent most of my time processing film.

There is no degree that can prepare you for this kind of job. You learn by doing.

But I love cars so I have to be successful at this.

37:00 - Some entrepreneurs try to tackle every social media platform at the same time. What has worked for you?

I try to focus on social media platforms that either bring me money, or that I enjoy using. I don’t like SnapChat. I found that if I put the energy that I would spend on marketing into just making another video, I’ll get a better return.

I produce content that I want to watch, and so people share it. That goes across any platform. The fact that I hate everyone else’s content makes me better at my job.

Your last column won’t write the next one for you. Keep producing content.

I have made some garbage content that is still easily searchable on the internet. But you have to move past it and make something better.

I’ve had every worst-case scenario happen short of killing somebody. At one point, I literally had no money. I had 250,000 subscribers, was releasing a TV series, was putting out videos that were getting millions of views, and I took a job bouncing at a bar for $50 a night so I could cover the bills. Fans were coming up and asking me to take a photo with them while I was carding them at the door.

Being famous is really inconvenient if you aren’t also rich. If you are famous and poor, that is sh**ty.

Now I still do some side work but it’s all related to my industry. Like maybe I’ll do appearances as car shows, or emcee at an event. I can command a decent day rate now which is much better than bouncing at a bar!

46:45 - If you were going to start something like this again today, what would you do?

I have no idea. I’m super O.G. YouTuber. There are 3rd generation YouTubers. The people that grew up watching me now have fans who grew up watching them. It seems so saturated now. When I started, there were NO premium content creators in the content space that weren’t magazines. There was nothing. Now that market is quite saturated.

What nobody wants to say is that the answer is if you want to be me, you have to start by being me. You have to have the personality, the passion, the ability to speak on camera or produce something. I can give you the formula for what hard work looks like. Ultimately, if you are not the personality that is driven and studious enough, that someone wants to listen to you, you’ll never get anywhere.

I hate talking about this because I’m no-one special. I’m just a dude who likes cars. But if someone points a camera at you and your personality changes, this isn’t for you. I can be the same person if there is one camera or a studio audience.

Watch my videos and see what goes into the making.

Adobe premiere pro
Studying Titles, SEO and Tags for YouTube
How to place good merchandise
Camera angles
Sound bits
What time and days to upload content
Social media management

I do all of these things. To be successful you have to break down what your job is and become proficient in all of the things you need to be doing. Understand how all the systems work so when you are big enough to hire someone else to do it and you can give the right instructions.

If you want to compete with someone who is already doing it, just take your own angle to differentiate.

56:00 - Rapid fire:

Do you think flying cars will become a thing?

Absolutely not. Humans can’t even be trusted to drive on the ground. Do you really think they will be able to drive in the air?

What’s your favorite road to drive so far and why do you like driving it?

There is a road in Switzerland called the Susten Pass. That’s about as good as it gets. Nobody up there, beautiful mountains, fresh air. Up in the alps, it’s brilliant.

What really went through your head when you said, “Oh Jesus, this gentleman is dragging a log?”

That was the most profitable video I’ve ever made!

When I was driving along I could see the dirt trail. But I was confused about how it was weaving all over the road. Shock and disbelief. That’s one of the most dangerous things I’ve ever seen on a road. But I’m glad that video did over 2 million views. That was the most viewed post on Reddit for 24 hours!

There’s another video of the Dinan BMW M4 and there are people in the road doing pushups which is another super crazy one.

I have two videos coming up. One where I’m driving a 1955 Mercedes 300SL Gullwing and in the first corner of the video there’s a girl crossing the street on a horse. I screech to a halt.

In another one I have a vintage Porsche, it just started raining and we come up on a guy who just crashed a Malibu in a ditch in front of us.

Additional Resources:

What types of digital products can I sell online?

How much should I charge for my digital product?

Matt Farah’s Instagram Page

Episode 9 - How entrepreneurs sold $1/4 billion of digital products through SendOwl

2017-05-10T15:25:15Z

This is the show where we usually interview successful digital entrepreneurs who are making waves on the internet with their online businesses. But today we are going to do things a little bit differently.

SendOwl is joining me today for longer than usual. That's because today is our celebratory podcast. SendOwl has just crossed $250,000,000 of sales transacted through our platform.

We have invited a number of our closest and best friends to come and speak to you today about how they've found success in their business using the SendOwl platform.

SendOwl must have very strong wings because he's delivered digital products across the world to over 186 countries.

Let's hear from our guests!

Mark Morris - Founder and Director of Introversion Software

Software

We announced our sixth major video game release yesterday. It's called Scanner Sombre and it drops tomorrow. It's a game about exploring a cave using LIDAR. LIDAR is like radar but instead of radio waves it uses light waves.

We are a video game developer and publisher. We handle everything from the very first scratch of a pencil for an idea for a game, all the way through to development, product, sales, and marketing. This is unusual for our industry.

We've been going for 15 years. Our biggest success was Prison Architect. We've sold over 2 million units so far.

In the games industry, there is one major platform to sell games and that's called Steam. They own 90% of the market globally. But we have always maintained our own streak of independence and a desire to not have to conform to constraints placed on us from a 3rd party. When we launched Prison Architect it wasn't finished. But we updated the game every month and we got more customers involved. That mechanism to make updates wasn't available with other platforms. But it was with SendOwl.

SendOwl did perfectly what I wanted to do. To have a light-weight system with just a little bit of code attached to a few buttons and we were able to sell.

We switched to SendOwl from another commerce system and we had no faith in that one. It was very difficult to debug. Impossible to upgrade. It was very bad. With SendOwl we found the solution to this problem and we've been using it since.

It's much easier for us to track ecommerce and data when we do it from our own store.

My experience with SendOwl has been really good. When we first went live with Prison Architect the number of sales was tens of thousands per day. I had a Skype line directly through to SendOwl founder George Palmer and he really took care of us.

When you run a business and you have a platform like SendOwl backing you up, you need good customer support response.

I also like the constant drip of new features that come regularly. All of the new features are useful for us and sometimes things I've asked for.

I'm really pleased.

Nobody else that I could find was doing what SendOwl was doing. And when we decided to take the plunge, everything worked and we had great support. Great news about your $1/4 billion milestone.

Wedge Black - Consultant with Clearbox Consulting

Information Technology

We're a business consultancy firm. We help organizations with their intranet and digital workplace. It's about working out business requirements and strategy for their intranet systems.

There's a great deal of SharePoint use because Microsoft has done so well with Office 365. We are also happy to use any sort of software that can build an intranet including open source software. We help companies sort out what solution to use and how to build it.

Information management is at the core of what we do. People. Content. Communications. Collaboration. Business Processes.

We're a B2B company but we get a lot of traffic to our website and we work really hard on our blog. Although what we do is physical in real life, we also find that what we do online is really important and it builds our credibility with our clients. How we deliver our expertise online is really important.

Right now, there is a lot of opportunity to develop SharePoint intranet. We've put together a report which is a very long PDF detailing our 26 assessments of the various products that are out there to help any company transform their SharePoint to a decent intranet.

It's 250 pages, 26 reviews, and it's taken thousands of hours to put together. We're selling it for £400 and deliver it through SendOwl to get it to people in a secure manner.

Once we signed up for SendOwl we immediately got it onto the website and we were making sales in days. The integration is really nice. We started off with the PayPal integration but that's not great for businesses around the world. So, we continued to use SendOwl but we use the Stripe integration instead for a choice of payment gateways. Buyers can just use a credit card and get it done.

We sell it 24 hours a day and it's all automated through SendOwl which is great. To do something that creates revenue for us online is a new venture for us and we're glad that it's been so successful.

Amy Lynn Andrews - Founder AmyLynnAndrews.com

Blogging

I started blogging in 2004. I actually just hobby blogged for many years and in 2010 decided to start generating income through my blog. Now I get so many questions about how I started, how I set up WordPress, and everything else.

My blog now is about teaching others how to start their own blog, making money online, and building email lists. That sort of thing.

After being in the blogging space for 13+ years and experiencing frustration myself, I think that people who are interested in starting a blog run into 3 problems.

One, what information is trustworthy?
Two, what information is accurate?
Three, who has time to sift through all the advice out there?

Because of this, I started keeping a log of all the most important blogging strategies which are up to date, accurate, and trustworthy. I call it The Knowtbook.

There's not a lot of fluff around it. It's really straightforward. I hand curate all of it and I'm super picky about the quality of information that I pass on.

I found SendOwl on my own and I'm a paying customer, and I really like it. It's important for me to only recommend products that I personally know of as a customer. I use SendOwl to generate income on my blog.

I've tried a lot of applications online and I really like SendOwl. To be able to send buyers to SendOwl is easy. Why can't everything be so easy?

I'm constantly looking for solutions that are simple. Many SaaS companies get overloaded with too much going on. Since my business is just me, doing things quickly and streamlined is key.

Amira Rahim - Fine Artist

Artist

I am a full time artist and abstract painter. I create colorful, vibrant, soulful paintings and I've been selling online for about 3 years now.

Primarily I sell physical paintings, but recently I started experimenting with digital downloads. Shipping art is challenging because it's a fragile item.

I recently switched from Squarespace to Shopify in 2016 and SendOwl is one of the apps that I've been using. I'm really happy with the results so far.

I knew that I wanted to start offering digital downloads of my art. I went to the app store to find one that could do it and I found SendOwl.

I create scaled-down, cropped versions of my work. Only 8"x10" downloads. It helps me keep my licensing premium. When people download my work it allows them to collect bite-sized versions of my work. People use it in interesting ways.

What I like about SendOwl is that I can sync the products with the Shopify store. I'm not really tech-savvy. I have an artist brain! But SendOwl was easy to figure out how to use. I just needed to type the information in and everything was updated.

I allow people to download some digital items for free as a lead magnet. It's a nice way to market myself without pushing the sales angle too hard.

Because I do so much training I also use SendOwl to deliver e-trainings and courses. They can purchase a video from me and I send the training URL to them by email. I like the flexibility that SendOwl offers.

Dan Comerchero - Founder, The Pro Audio Files

Membership Community

The Pro Audio Files is a website and community that teaches people how to mix, record, produce, and master music. It's 600 free articles and free YouTube videos. We sell more in-depth training courses that people can download and purchase. We have a membership site with a community there.

We're teaching people how to mix, record, and produce music. The landscape has changed a lot in 7 years. We reach a lot of people. Musicians. Professional audio engineers. Even producers.

We have 10 different contributors that put out content.

Our core audience is basic and intermediate audio engineers. Even musicians. Some people come to the site to find out how to get a good guitar tone. Other articles are much more in-depth.

We live in a great time when you can quickly build a business yourself using great services. We use WordPress for the blog. We sell all our products on SendOwl, which has been a total blessing.

The music industry is tough. It's hard to make money selling music, so it’s important to have your hands in a lot of things. A lot of the guys and girls that visit our site run their own studies and they use the Pro Audio Files to improve their knowledge. You can purchase the complete bundle for $350 vs how much you pay for university. It's a great deal.

I love SendOwl. I switched to SendOwl from the first ecommerce platform we used. I was so relieved. The good design. The minimalism. It's a very thoughtful UI. The features are deliberate. I switched everyone I knew with an audio site over to SendOwl to use the affiliate program. Kudos to you guys for building this.

I also think it's cool that I get messages from George the founder of SendOwl when I have customer service questions. He's tapped in on the ground level and always getting feedback on the business.

Marc Mueltin - Founder of V2G Clarity

High-Tech

I've been in Medellin for 3 days now. Lots to do otherwise I would learn Spanish and enjoy my time here.

I offer consultancy services which doesn't scale and I'm always trading time for money. I wanted to find a way to make money while I sleep and travel. I wanted to spread some post-surface knowledge by setting up an eBook. Those that want further knowledge can come to me and hire consulting services.

I'm a computer scientist and I did my PHD in the area of how can we integrate electric vehicles into the smart grid, which is the electric grid that allows devices to communicate with each other.

During my PHD I learned a lot about how this protocol works and I was starting my own standard. The industry's interest in this technology is steadily rising. Car manufacturers now need to know how this works.

I set up a website for myself but I didn't do much business development. Actually, people came to me because of my blog.

My second client needed some documentation about how the standard worked. I smartly arranged the contract so that I could keep the rights to the general content. That's how I came up with the eBook. It took less than 6 months.

I was looking for a platform that allows me to sell it quite easily. I found out about SendOwl and it has all the features I was looking for. Very easy checkout for the client. Very easy to set up for me. It's easy to update the product. I can update the version and my buyers get notified that an updated version is available.

I like the user interface. It's very clear to me. Affiliate marketing is really easy to set up and it works good for me. The VAT report is great. In Europe we have some complicated taxes that we need to do. SendOwl gives me all the data that my accountant needs.

I love the monthly reports that come to me by email. The price is also very fair.

I sell my book for 450 euros. I thought I might sell it for $80 or $90. But I read an interesting blog post about how to price your digital product which helped change my mind about how much I could sell it for.

Then I was in Bali at a great co-working space and they helped me see that nobody else in the world has the information that's in my eBook and they inspired my confidence to price it much higher. And it's going well so far.

I have the book, and a video tutorial, and then a combined product. The video is at 550 euros. I want them to buy everything together which is valued at 999 euros - and that's the best-selling product I have.

I provide 2 pages for free from every chapter which has been a great way to get people interested in my book.

Final Thoughts

Thanks for listening to our podcast today and joining us in celebration of our quarter-billion transacted sales.

If you're not currently using SendOwl you can go to SendOwl.com/POD to learn more and sign up for a free trial.

Episode 8 - How to make blogging your full-time business

2017-05-02T23:18:02Z

Blogging authority Amy Lynn Andrews sets the expectation for what it takes to make blogging your full time business.

How to make blogging your full time business

Hey everybody and welcome to the Digital Hustle Podcast. I'm James Milliron from SendOwl the leading digital sales and delivery app for entrepreneurs who want to make waves with their online business.

Today I'm pleased to be joined by Amy Lynn Andrews from amylynnandrews.com. Amy is the expert authority on blogging and how to monetize your blogging efforts.

Intro to Amy Lynn Andrews (2:00)

Amy: I started blogging in 2004 and I hobby blogged for many years. In 2010 decided to start generating income from my blog.

Now I teach people how start a blog, how to make money online, building email lists and the full package of blogging from beginning to end.

What are some common mistakes that people make when starting a blog? (5:15)

First, you need to separate mindset mistakes from actual practical mistakes. Mindset mistakes are the ones that think if they start a blog they can start making money quickly. That’s just not true. So you have to prepare yourself for this in your mind.

Practical mistakes are more technical in nature.

One mistake people make is immediately uploading images from their camera directly to their blog. But those images aren’t optimized. So they will slow your site down. I see this happen a lot.

Another mistake people make is to make their first blog post “I’m starting a blog.” It’s better to put this information on the About Page…

The best thing you should do is write 10-20 really solid pieces of content. When people come to the blog there should be something there that makes them stay there.

Not starting an email list right away is a mistake. You should capture your audience as possible in the beginning.

In the beginning, nobody is reading your blog. When you don’t have a readership it gives you time to work the kinks out and get into a rhythm. Once you find your rhythm then you can start talking about it to other people.

Don’t be afraid to start. Just be in learning more and willing to tweak things along the way.

How can I generate more traffic for my blog? (11:45)

What type of traffic do you want to generate? Organic traffic like Google search results? Paid ads like Facebook campaigns?

Let’s consider that organic traffic is your goal. It’s traffic that comes to you from search engines or via organic social media sharing.

When you write your posts, be very helpful. Think about what someone is going to type in Google to get to your post.

Be thorough in your coverage of the topic. Google has guidelines for content creators online. When Google sends someone to your site, their goal is to provide the information that person is looking for. The more thorough your answer, the better.

Make your content so good that people want to talk about it and share it with others.

Backlinks help search engines determine of your site is high quality or not.

How much does traffic matter for monetization? (16:00)

To focus on the traffic, that’s a mistake! You should focus on conversions. If you want to make money with your blog, the bottom line is conversion. And conversion means they are going to buy something from you.

The amount of traffic necessary depends on the type of monetization you are going for. If I want to make an income from Adsense I need super high traffic. If I’m selling a product it doesn’t matter how much traffic I get. You can have smaller amounts of traffic but make the same amount of money by reaching customers in other ways beyond monetizing pageviews.

How should I decide which is the best method for me to monetize my blog when I start out? (19:50)

Think about what makes the most sense for you. Your season of life and personality should be huge determining factors. When I started my blog back in 2004 I was at home and my husband was working outside. We also had kids at that point. I didn’t have good sleeping babies so I was up for hours every night tending to hungry crying babies. So for those first few years there was no way I could have focused with any clarity on monetization in any way that was regular. So I just opted at that point to keep my blog at a hobby. It wasn’t until later that I could focus on money.

It’s easy to see someone doing something good and try to become that. But they might be in a different season of life than you.

What is your personality? A popular method at this point in time is to sell a membership site or subscription. Creating content on a regular basis for people who want to be a part of an inside community. It’s subscription based concept. For me that would never work. I have zero desire to do it because of my personality type. It’s a fantastic model, but it’s just not for me!

Think also about your target audience. Who are they and what are they willing to buy? If your market is college students and you provide a luxury product, are they in a position to buy it? If the two don’t mesh you might have a problem. What is your target audience willing to buy?

You may also look at another blog that is already monetizing, and determine how you can capture that market by standing out somehow.

What tools can I use to make money with my blog once I get traffic there? (27:30)

When I think about monetizing my blog I loosely split those options into 5 different categories.
- You can monetize with ads.
- You can monetize selling physical products.
- You can monetize selling digital products.
- You could monetize by selling a service like a virtual assistant service.
- You could do affiliate marketing which is promoting someone else’s product.

The number of options in each of these are infinite.

You can use Adsense or Adthrive.

You can use Kindle for books.

SendOwl for digital products.

Merch by Amazon for physical products.

Once you figure out which category of monetization you will tackle, do some research on the easiest ways you can make it happen on your website.

It can be overwhelming but it’s so exciting because there is so much room for everyone.

How long does it take to build a blog from zero revenue to cover the bills? (32:00)

There are so many factors involved… So I would ask these questions:

What is your background experience?
What is your business experience?
What is your computer and blogging experience?

For most of us, if you are starting from zero without much experience, going from scratch to covering the bills you should give yourself at least a year or two.

If you branch out into other ways you might be able to figure out how to bring in money quicker.

One of my favorite examples is Steve Chu from mywifequitherjob.com. Steve ran a blog for a long time but he also sells products through his online store. He says that if you need money quicker, selling a product is the best way to start. If you have the time to let it build up, then starting a blog is a great idea because you don’t have a lot of overhead and investment.

Should I solicit help from ghost writers or should I look at it far down the road? (35:40)

It can work, especially if the writers are good and can write good content. If you are thinking about it at the beginning, I would keep it in mind because you don’t want people to get so attached to you as the blog owner. Otherwise you will start a blog, build a big following, and then when you transition to ghost writers or contributors people will notice the change and lose interest. The whole feel of the blog can change.

If you want to solicit help from others, go for it. Make it about the content then, and less about your own brand.

What can people find by looking at your service The Knowtbook (39:00)

There are 3 problems that people run into when trying to start a blog.

1 – They don’t know what information online is trustworthy. How do I know that the person giving the information? 2 – They’re not sure which information is accurate about starting a blog. 3 – They don’t have time to sift through all the information.

There are so many people who want to start online. My website is aimed at helping them to get started blogging. But the Knowtbook is aimed at helping people go beyond blogging and use their blog as a springboard for another thing.

I don’t want people to get stuck watching hours of course material to find the 15 minute section that they really need.

The Knowtbook isn’t fancy. It’s very straightforward. You go in, get what you need, and come out without much fluff.

I hand-curate the whole thing. If it’s in there, I wrote it!

What tools do you personally use to bring in revenue from your blog? (43:50)

My chosen monetization strategies are:

Selling my own products. An eBook. The Knowtbook. I’ve dabbled in physical products.

Affiliate marketing. I recommend products to my readers and 90-95% of those are products that I use as a paying customer.

For example, I recommend SendOwl to my readers. I found SendOwl on my own and I’m a paying customer but I really like SendOwl so I became a part of their affiliate program. I only recommend products that I recommend as a customer.

Owl Questions – What do you love most about blogging? (45:30)

The thing I love most about blogging is that anyone can do it. And I know people making far more money doing this than me, and I make a full time income on it.

People get discouraged sometimes. I totally understand that. I’m not a patient person in general, so I get it! But if you find something you are passionate about and if you find something that you have a unique angle or spin on it, you can do it.

What are some things that you already do in your life that people compliment you about? What do people marvel at? That could be your blog story! You can be the go-to resource for that thing!

Business in the past was: you have to be the big company with a ton of ad spend. It’s not like that anymore. You can create a business by yourself with your blog today.

How can people get in touch with you? (53:30)

Amylynnandrews.com

Additional Resources

If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Digital Hustle podcast on iTunes and the SendOwl channel on YouTube.

How to publish an eBook: free guide!

What types of digital products can I sell online?

Episode 7 - Building an online business with email nurturing campaigns

2017-04-25T18:30:21Z

In this episode of the Digital Hustle Podcast we sit down and have a lively chat with Tom Tate, Product Marketing Manager for AWeber. AWeber was founded on creating an email automation solution almost 20 years ago. They’ve been doing this a long time. So who better to tap for email automation advice!

Building an online business with email nurturing campaigns

This podcast is hosted by SendOwl, the leading platform for sales and delivery of digital products, subscriptions, and memberships.

Let’s get into it!

Detail about AWeber (2:00)

AWeber is an email service provider since 1998
Email automation tools
Integrated with SendOwl

How do you define email nurturing? (2:46)

It’s building a relationship and at scale! Email nurturing is intimacy at scale. You can’t just send an email to anyone. Spam!

Email nurturing is basically just taking advantage of the ability to send valuable content through email and doing it over time. Then if you have provided enough value, you’ve equipped them with what they need to know to make the purchase.

Most people miss the mark by stopping the nurturing process after the sale is finished. You can and should continue to engage.

It’s like a bank account. If you want to make a relationship withdrawal you have to make deposits as well. Email nurturing is making those deposits by providing great material.

What kinds of businesses can use email nurturing? (6:00)

A lot of people think that email marketing is not for them. But you are not your customer. You are not your audience. You may dislike signing up for email lists but other people do.

Any business should use email nurturing!

Online, people don’t have the chance to meet you face to face, so give them the chance to know you, like you, and trust you. Online businesses should definitely use email nurturing. Your buyers buy online so engage with them online. When you engage and keep your brand top of mind you get more referral business also.

Ryan Deiss says “You won’t ask someone to marry them on the first date.” Your product might not be a small ask. Nurturing brings people closer to commitment.

People try to invest their time and money in social media marketing but you have to be considerate of the fact that people aren’t on Facebook looking for products to buy. They’re not in a buying mindset. If you really want to sell your product, email is the place to be.

They say it takes somewhere between 7 and 11 touches to get somebody to buy. Is that accurate? (12:00)

We’ve seen conversions happen after 3 emails in a 7 day window mostly. It depends on the persuasiveness of your content or your industry. It’s very possible to convert in the first message or the first week. We’ve seen people send out an email every day, 365 in a year.

The question is: How much value do you need to give before they recognize that the product is for them? Give Give Give Ask Give Give Ask

3 Gives and an Ask then 2 Gives and an Ask has worked for us.

Too many entrepreneurs are stuck in the mentality of promotion promotion promotion. Nurturing is about giving something. And most people need to get some value before putting money on the table.

One of the best things you can do is give away the first bite sized piece of your product for free. Then send a few emails so people can slowly unpack that value over the course of a few emails. Highlight all the value you’ve given them in just that one bite-sized piece. And that’s only a snippet of what’s to come!

What’s the benefit of using an automation tool instead of doing this manually? (18:00)

The first benefit is that as you scale it’s just not feasible to do it manually. It’s going to be too much to follow up with people. If you have a super high ticket product and you have a sales team then maybe it’s possible for you. If you are selling a digital product under $30 it’s not possible for you to do that outreach directly. Use automation to save a lot of money and time.

You can use personalization tags in your automation tool to make it seem more personal.

Second, you’ll get to a point where you can’t do this in bulk. Your deliverability will be better using a service provider. The IP addresses behind automation services are stronger and deliverability will be better.

How can you use forms on a website to automatically enroll subscribers to a nurturing campaign and not just a list? (21:30)

With AWeber we have a feature called “Campaigns.” You can set up multiple campaigns within one list. They can be triggered from the moment somebody initially subscribes or it can be based on a tag. A tag works like this: If somebody opts in on page A then we are going to send them campaign A. It’s a higher level of contextual marketing.

How can I use the data captured from a form from my buyers to cross-sell them on other products I have available? (22:50)

In AWeber that would be passing through the data capture from the form with the use of tags to trigger specific campaigns on related products.

The ability to say, “You bought product A so now you are tagged with product A,” is really powerful. In the subscriber management area, you can create some pretty powerful segments using our query builder.

On Facebook advertising, you can create a segment of all your subscribers in AWeber, email them with the promotion, and then take that list, export it, import it into Facebook as a custom audience and run a promotional Facebook ad campaign.

Facebook also has lookalike audiences which is great. You can drop in all of your subscribers and target people like the ones that bought you already. If you do this, you can run awareness campaigns. They don’t know your brand yet but you can give them some great content to opt in for and they will become leads and join the cycle.

What is the psychology behind email nurturing? (28:25)

Don’t think of it as an email “blast.” Try to speak to one person by sending relevant content. Get people to know, like, and trust you by being human and proving that you can solve the problem they have. Be clear and compelling by providing value.

In Owl Language (31:00)

What is your number one tip for people just starting out?

It can be discouraging if you’re not getting many sign-ups at the beginning. One thing I like to do in that automated sequence is to ask a simple question. “I just want to ask you one quick question.” Ask them a question that you want to know the answer to and you will get actual responses from people who hit that reply button. You will learn so much more about your audience from those responses than you will get anywhere else. You will learn from them what you need to do next to build your product.

It’s important to do this earlier in your business than later because you need to respond to everyone that replies to you directly. So do it early and gather this wildly important data.

Additional resources:

30 Day Free Trial of SendOwl – The best way to sell and deliver digital files online
Tom Tate Twitter Account
SendOwl Twitter Account
How to Sell Product Memberships and Subscriptions

Episode 6 - With Rachel Andrew - The steady journey from expert to influencer

2017-04-18T15:30:01Z

Web dev entrepreneur Rachel Andrew explains what it's like to go from expert to influencer, starting with a skillset, nurturing it into a business, and traveling around the world as a public speaker.

Intro: Hey everybody and welcome to the Digital Hustle Podcast. I'm James Milliron from SendOwl and yes, I was just talking to an owl... Hey look, we were all blessed with various talents and some people just have different talents than others, okay?

And speaking of talents, if you are looking to utilize your talents to build a business, you have come to the right place!

This is the show where we interview the movers and shakers in the digital selling space.

Our guest today is Rachel Andrew, someone who I can only describe as serial digital entrepreneur. Today we are going to take a look into her life, explore the businesses that she's build, and learn the strategies that she has used to become successful in her own online journey.

James Milliron Welcome Rachel how are you doing today?

Rachel Andrew: I'm good thanks! I got off the flight from Seattle yesterday. That's a bad time difference for me. That eight hours is nasty!

Introduction to Rachel Andrew and her projects.

I'm a web developer, author, and public speaker.
I've been a web developer for 20 years.
My main product is a CMS called Perch.
I do a lot of with speaking and writing about standards and CSS.
I'm on the road about 4 months out of the year!

2:30 - How did you go from developing sites into consulting into starting your own firm?

I started doing this back when site building was trivial and there wasn't much to learn.
I was known as the person who knew HTML so I did some freelancing at that time.
Then I went to work for a couple dot com companies and it was just around the time that the dot com crash happened.
I realized it was better for me to work for myself than a company which might just fold.
So I went back freelance!
I've worked for myself since 2001 and set up Edgeofmyseat.com at the time.
After doing so much work for other people's projects we launched our own.

Starting a business and staying organized

5:30 - What was the hardest part of starting your own business and how did you overcome that?

Money and instability was the hardest part.
I was lucky enough to be helped by an organization in the UK called The Prince's Trust.
I was mentored by them and now I even go back and speak at their events.
Having someone to talk to is very important. Today you can get advice online easily. Back then it was more difficult. It was important for me to have their help.
It's helpful for new entrepreneurs to see someone who has build a successful business.

8:20 - You've authored multiple books. What strategies do you use to get so much on paper so quickly?

I think by writing! I tend to write things down to work them out for myself. This results in a lot of content.
I don't ever sit there and stare at the screen thinking that I need to write this thing.
If I have deadlines I just get on with it!
If I'm writing a book, I outline it and then I jump to another section on another day.
I don't let myself just sit and look at a blank page.
Staying organized is important. I keep everything in OmniFocus.

10:30 - How do you keep things organized? What tools do you use?

I usually use my computer and I usually work in Markdown.
I use Ulysses markdown editor. I like that.
As long as it syncs to Dropbox I'm happy with it!
I don't worry much about formatting. I just write, and sort it all out later.

From expert to influencer - The tipping point

12:00 - When did the tipping point happen for you when you transitioned from being an expert in your field to public speaking and being recognized as an influencer?

When my daughter became independent it become more of a possibility for me.
Conferences and public speaking does add a weird layer of internet celebrity which I'm a bit uncomfortable with... nobody needs to be shy about coming to talk so someone who is just a peer.
Thankfully I'm reasonably comfortable getting on stage and talking about this stuff!
I'm quite introverted and I struggle to make those conversations happen at a meetup. The good thing about a conference is you have a platform which makes it easier.
The best thing about the speaking life is that people do want to talk to you, and that's great.
Don't worry so much about becoming a public figure. Focus on what you are good at and sharing it! It's just about sharing and listening to others.

15:20 - What is your current hustle?

We just shipped version 3 of Perch!
I'm currently working on a book.
I'm right in the middle of conference season. Next week I'm off to Tokyo!
Planes are a good place to write! I get a lot done on planes. Those 10 hour flights are great for it.

16:40 - You use SendOwl to sell books on your personal site, how is that going for you?

SendOwl is really quick. You can just pop it up onto your site and sells stuff and it's all just dealt with.
For anyone who wants to sell something, a book or whatever, you don't want to spend too much time messing around with how to deliver the thing. You want to get it out there!
That's where SendOwl has done really well. It's nice, it's straightforward, and you don't spend days faffing around with the thing.

Work-life balance

18:00 - You're a mother. You run marathons. How do you manage to build and run a successful business while excelling in your personal life also?

Partly is I don't sleep very much! I like being busy. I don't really have a concept of sitting and watching TV. I've never done that. I'm always doing something as well.
I am incredibly organized. I have to do my own travel booking and expense claims and such. So I have to be organized. I'm organized with the personal stuff as well. Everything goes into OmniFocus.

19:30 - Are you organized from the beginning or do you set aside specific time to reorganize everything?

It's a bit of both. Some things need to be done every quarter. Typically I try to knock it out once per day. I quickly deal with anything that comes in. If I can't deal with it now, I make a task for it in OmniFocus.

Documenting gives you a head start on content

20:45 - How did you take The CSS Workshop from idea to inception?

This was based on the work I'd done for in-person workshops. I had 2 days worth of material. I thought there must be a way to sell it online in some way. So I came up with the idea to deliver it via video tutorials with a Slack group that people could ask questions in.
Recording video is so time consuming. But we got it done!
It's been online for about a year now and it's been a really nice way to get more out of the content that's already written instead of limiting the content to just 6 workshops per year.
Spin material in different ways!

22:40 - How would the course have been if there wasn't video?

The video is what people like and it's something I had to learn because I don't find video useful in the slightest. I'm completely non-visual!
It does seem it's the best way for people to learn! It massively cuts down on our support.
We all learn differently. So I do a lot of video now even though I don't learn that way.

24:00 - How much time does it take to get an online course from idea to a fully executed program?

I had all the material but I was recording for about 8 weeks.
I was getting up early and spending a few hours recording.
The editing is what took forever! Get a good setup and work out exactly how you plan to accomplish it all. It's time consuming.
You can't wake up tomorrow and decide you will have a course completed and launched in 2 weeks from today.
For anyone that wants to do video stuff, do some short videos first and see how people like them. Put them out on YouTube first. It will give you an idea of whether you can put up with doing it long-term. If you get positive feedback then you can put more time into it.

27:10 - You've tackled a number of different businesses. Is it better to create a niche business that you've mastered completely or broaden your reach to mass market?

If you are bootstrapping, you need to go to a niche business. You can't compete with the giants. And you won't have time to go into something you don't understand well. Nor will you have the resources to mass advertise.
We developed a CMS for web designers who were building small sites for clients because we knew about web designers. We didn't try to take on Wordpress!
Figure out where you expertise can fit into the market!

30:40 - What other products and services do you have that could be useful for people working on their own businesses?

I've got an ebook called The Profitable Side Project which is our story of how we started Perch and some of the things I learned while doing it - Available on my site sold through SendOwl.

31:10 - SendOwl questions

In Owl Language “What's it like working on the road?”

If you are going to travel 4 months out of the year and run a business you need to figure out how to get things done.
Schedule the important stuff to get that done!
Keep a standard routine while on the road. For me, that's keeping up my fitness and eating well.
Have a good setup while traveling. I travel with a Roost Stand. I don't travel light but I can get into a hotel and set up a comfortable work station.
Invest some time and money into a traveling work kit. It's invaluable.

Additional resources

33:45 - How can listeners reach you?

@rachelandrew on Twitter.
RachelAndrew.co.uk
GrabAPerch.com

34:10 - Wrap up additional resources and contact information

Visit SendOwl.com/POD to get a 30 day free trial of SendOwl.

If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Digital Hustle podcast on iTunes and the SendOwl channel on YouTube.

How to sell digital products online

Episode 5 - How to build beautiful emails that keep customers coming back for more

2017-04-11T00:00:00Z

"...the nurse writes down on the tablet that she has the email address of the baby... and I will make sure that they send me those email addresses from birth. Whenever it comes to fruition maybe I can give them a commission or something like that...”

Intro: Hello everyone and welcome to the SendOwl Digital Hustle podcast. Today we are talking about emails! Email design. Beautiful emails. How to keep customers coming back for more.

My special guest today is Ilma Nausedaite, CMO of MailerLite.

James Milliron Hi Ilma how are you today?

Ilma Nausedaite: Hey James. I'm good. Thank you for having me here.

James Milliron: Tell me a little bit about yourself and your business.

1:00 – Introduction to MailerLite.

Email marketing platform.
270,000 customers all over the world.

1:30 - How does email design contribute to online sales and conversions?

Design is not how it looks or feels. It's about how it works.
Content is actually the most important.
Design should be transparent.
Functionality of the design is what matters.

3:00 - What is a good click through rate?

If you want to have 100% open rate, email your mother!
A good open rate for an ebusiness is 20% and CTR is 3-5%.

5:45 - Is an A/B test on email design something that you can get immediate results from or do we need to do it over a period of time?

You can get results within 2 days. But A/B testing is a never-ending process.
Everybody A/B tests subject lines, but you should try testing other things also.
Test things like pre-header text.
Test GIFs
Test sender names

8:00 - Everybody segments their databases, but how do different age groups respond to email design variations?

Focusing on the content is the most important.
The design should be helping to lead the message.
Less is more for every age category.
Design plays a big role but what matters the most is the content.

12:00 - What are some lesser known design ideas that could increase CTR?

Use surveys in an email and ask questions. People respond when they are asked questions in an email.
Make sure you have an email and landing page with similar design elements.
GIFs are great to promote a video before sending someone to the full video. It's very effective.
I love GIFs. They attract attention in a world of low attention spans.
People know GIFs are short, so they watch them to the end.

16:45 - When is it most effective to use a text-only message?

Use this to appear very personal and friendly.
Text only emails always come across more personal.
More people reply to text-only emails.
Around 40% of users are reading emails without images turned on.
Text emails make sure your message gets read.

19:15 - When is it most effective to send a longer email with a lot of design?

In today's time, less is more. Nobody is going to scroll down. If they have to, they will miss any points in the middle of the email.

22:00 - Some people design an image in Photoshop and then just insert that into an email client. Why is this a bad idea?

This was okay 10 years ago but today email marketing is not about just sending leaflets.
Also, attaching an image to an email, the deliverability can go down significantly.
Don't do that!
Also, sending an email without a client is bad because you don't get to gather the valuable data which you get from an email client.

25:30 - What are some time-saving features of MailerLite?

We have custom-made templates. They look great and you can re-use them time and time again.
Drag and drop tools make design fast.
Automation makes it possible for you to set up a whole email series with low effort.

28:45 - How can the design of an "unsubscribe page" affect the way people unsubscribe?

Definitely don't ever hide the unsubscribe link. If you get marked as spam it's a very bad thing.
If somebody really wants to unsubscribe, let them go!
One thing you can do is survey people on the unsubscribe page. Find out why so you can fix it in the future.

32:00 - What's a unique trick that a MailerLite customer has done which was effective.

One company in London sent an email with no subject line. We thought maybe it was a bug at first. They informed us that it was intentional. They purposefully sent an email with no subject line and they got a ton of replies. It was an opportunity to build a relationship.
Everything connected to free stuff or even webinars works great.

35:50 - How can listeners use MailerLite?

Visit MailerLite.com and sign up for a free account!

36:45 - Owl questions

In Owl Language “What's the most effective way to build interest for my personal brand?”

People need stories to relate to. We are all human! We need stories.
Tell stories with your emails.
Talk about what you believe in.
Talk about your team.
Talk about all sorts of things that create good stories to latch onto.

39:15 - Wrap up additional resources and contact information

Visit SendOwl.com/POD to get a 30 day free trial of SendOwl.

If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Digital Hustle podcast on iTunes and the SendOwl channel on YouTube.

How to sell online memberships and subscriptions

How to choose a digital download service (we look at your best options)

2017-04-18T10:07:49Z

Digital downloads services make it easy for you to sell digital products, subscriptions and memberships direct from your website, blog or anywhere you can paste a link. In this article, we'll look at how you can make sure your digital download service is a great match for your specific business.

Who are you and what do you want to do?

You're an enterprising solopreneur and want to sell 1-5 digital products from your blog or website
You're a small business and you want to sell digital products direct to your customers with minimum fuss
You're an internet marketer and want to monetise your following by selling digital products to them
You're a large company and want to move away from iTunes and other third party platforms that take a large % cut of your sales and stop you forming a profitable relationship with your customers

What you need from your digital download service

1. Solopreneurs

You've got a great product or some nifty ideas and you're sure you can make some money. Although you might still be working another job, you see your future in creating your own business and brand and doing what you love. You should look for a digital download service that helps you with these areas:

Good value for money and the ability to upgrade your digital download service as your company grows. Services that take a % cut of sales can look enticing if you're unsure of your prospects. However, if you think you'll make more than $200-$300 a month you'll be better off with a company that offers a fixed monthly pricing plan.
Simple set up and maintenance. You're a busy person so make sure you choose a service that is genuinely easy to set up and use. Take various digital download services for a test drive. Most should offer a free trial without you needing to give them your card details. If they don't, be cautious. You want a company that shows you how good they are rather than giving you a load of unsubstantiated marketing spiel.

I started blogging in 2004. Since 2010 I have been teaching others how to start and make money with a blog. The Knowtbook is a go-to place for bloggers to get accurate up-to-date info on what you should be doing now. It helps people use their blogs as springboards to other things, and I sell it with SendOwl. Amy Lynn Andrews

A Buy Now option rather than Add to Cart. If you're selling a couple of ebooks, for example, you're best adding a Buy Now button to your website or blog. That way customers can make an immediate purchase without getting distracted or needing to take extra steps. Some download services only offer an Add to Cart function which isn't really suitable if you only have a few products.
Friendly customer support. If you're new to digital selling then you might need some help with a specific question or challenge. Make sure your digital download company has a helpful and wide-ranging knowledge base that offers videos and written explanations that will get you unstuck fast. Also, they should offer helpful email customer support when only contact with a real person will do.
Marketing help. If you're fairly new entrepreneur then you probably have a lot of questions about marketing. Don't we all! Some download services will offer you helpful in-built marketing features (like one-click upsells, cart abandonment, an affiliate scheme, and so on). Others will provide helpful content on how to price your digital product, for example. However, there is a lot of great information on the web about marketing so although most download services should help with this topic, they can only do so much. After all, if they concentrate heavily on marketing they won't be doing a very good job at digital delivery!

2. Small businesses

You're a growing small business with a clear idea of what problem you're solving for a specific audience. You may already sell physical products, or you may be selling digital products and not really be very happy with your set up. You want a download service that will be reliable and do a professional job. So, look for a digital download service that has these options:

Multi-user accounts. Nothing is more frustrating than a download service that only offers one login, which is no use when you want a few members of your team to be involved with digital selling. Look for a download service that offers multi-user accounts, which lets you give different permissions to different people, so you can control access to sensitive financial information, for example.
Reliability. You don't want to choose a download service that looks like it might go down the plughole tomorrow. A bit of research should let you know how long a download service has been around and how they're run. Do they prioritise long term growth or are investors pushing for short-term potentially destablising gains? Do they care about their customers as well as their profits?
Customisable. It's likely you've already got a strong brand and a business set up that works well for you. You need a digital download service that adapts to your business model rather than that forces you to adapt to it. Look for these features that should make a digital download company work for you: custom checkout fields; customisable checkout system; editable order emails.

We have always maintained our own streak of independence and a desire to not have to conform to the restraints of a 3rd party. SendOwl enables us to sell games to customers in our own way. When we first went live with Prison Architect, the number of sales was unbelievable. We were doing tens of thousands per day. Mark Morris, Introversion software

3. Internet marketers

You've worked hard to build a following who are heavily engaged with the content you produce. It's clear that they value your advice and would pay for certain type of content. So you decide to sell downloads, memberships or subscriptions direct. You care about conversion and maximising your revenue. You don't want to spend time wrestling with a download service that is cumbersome and unintuitive. Look for download services that offer these options:

A high-converting multi-language mobile-optimised checkout. As you know, a great checkout can be the difference between someone giving you money and someone deciding they can't be bothered. Make sure the checkout provided by your digital download service works for all your customers, no matter what language they speak or what device they are using. Also, make sure that you can offer your customers different payment options: credit and debit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Bitcoins should all be possible.
Built in marketing features. Some download services will go out of their way to help you maximise your revenue. Look for download services that offer: one-click upsells, cart abandonment, a built in affiliate scheme, Pay what you want pricing, on-site 'lightbox' checkout and discounts. All these features should help you maximise revenue without extra marketing spend. Also, consider whether you will get a better conversion rate selling direct from your blog or website rather than needing to use an extra 'selling page' provided by the download service.
Integrations with all your favourite services. It's likely that you're already using a number of online services and that you want them to link up with your digital download service. Fair enough. Look for a download service that integrates with the services that matter to you. However, a download service can't – and shouldn't – integrate with every app. So look for a download service that also integrates with Zapier, which then lets you easily links different apps together.
Drip functionality. If you plan to sell memberships/subscriptions then you'll need a download service that lets you 'drip' content to customers on a schedule decided by you rather then letting customers download everything at once.
A show don't tell approach. Although you know the power of persuasive content and grand marketing claims, you're probably best choosing a download service that offers a straightforward introduction to what they do and that lets you take them for a test drive first. You're the expert marketer so choose a download service that has the technical knowledge and commitment to support your business rather than trying to out-market you!

The Pro Audio Files has over 600 free videos and articles on how to mix and record music. A lot of musicians are looking to record. Producers are dabbling in mixing. People need a good resource to keep learning. We also have paid courses which we sell through SendOwl. I appreciate the good design and minimalism of it. Now other audio sites have become affiliates of ours. Dan Comerchero, The Pro Audio Files

4. Large companies

You're a lead in a large company and you've been tasked with improving – or revolutionising – your company's approach to digital selling. You're in good company. More and more publishers and music corporations or looking to sell direct, form a relationship with their customers, and keep most of their profits. Look for a download service that has these qualities:

Proven ability to scale. Most download services don't have the capacity to deal with major music or ebook launches. Make sure you choose a company that has a track record in this area, as well as the proven technical capacity to work with a large company.
Multi-user accounts. Look for a download service that offers multi-user accounts, which lets you give different permissions to different people. So you can control access to sensitive financial information, for example.
Shopify integration. Many large companies create a shop using Shopify, which offers a professional and proven ecommerce service. If you go this route, look for a Shopify-endorsed download company so you have a seamless selling experience.
Swift customer support. If there's a hitch in your product launch strategy, you need a company that will get everything back on track as quickly as possible. Choose a company that can guarantee you excellent customer support should you need it.

Need more information on digital selling?

Comparison chart of four download services

At SendOwl, we work with solopreneurs, small businesses, internet marketers and multinationals to help them sell digital products as easily and profitably as possible. We love what we do and we're confident about the quality of our company. We've compiled a fact-based chart that shows what we offer, in comparison to three of our competitors.

How to sell online memberships and subscriptions

Episode 4 - With Brennan Dunn: How freelancers can demonstrate extra value to fill their sales funnels

2017-04-04T00:00:00Z

"...Then you're able to charge more because you're delivering a better product. It's easier to close deals. And you have a lot more creative freedom which I think is probably what every freelancer wants. Those three things.”

Intro: Hello everyone and welcome to the SendOwl Digital Hustle podcast. And in case I don't see you - Good afternoon. Good evening. And goodnight. Don't worry. We are just getting started!

I’m James Milliron from SendOwl, and if you don't want to listen to me, you should listen to my guest today: Brennan Dunn. Brennan is the number one authority in the whole world on helping freelancers increase their value. The advice he's giving on this podcast can be applied to almost any business.

This podcast is hosted by SendOwl the leading digital sales and delivery app for entrepreneurs who want to increase their online sales conversion rates, to provide a seamless checkout experience for their buyers, and for those who want to get setup up and selling in under 5 minutes.

You can learn more about SendOwl by visiting upsell them than it is to try to sell them directly on your core services.

Last year I built a course on Marketing Automation. Today most of my consulting projects come from people who had signed up for that course.

When people see what you teach and like it, they will come back to you for more help.

A better way to build a funnel is get people to sign up for an email list. Then pitch them on a $30 ebook. Then let people self-select what they are interested in before you pitch them on consultation services or projects.

This is an effective way to build and nurture a pipeline.

Sometimes people don't trust you enough yet to jump into your core services.

Building a course or a drip campaign can build trust and move people closer to buying your core services.

This reduces risk for your clients and now they want to work with the expert that taught them.

14:00 - This keeps customers from scouring the whole market for someone else who can do the same thing as you.

It becomes risker now for your audience to look for someone else than to work with you. Now that you've established yourself as the expert. You're the most trusted and thus the less risky option.
I'm willing to pay a premium for someone who has already proven their services.

16:40 - There are stages of inbound marketing where you can catch a potential buyer. Freelancers can create courses or resources and make them available online so that once they are hooked, they don't have a choice but to stick with you.

A $30 product that you offer is super low risk and can be an impulse buy. It's easier to grab their attention with a product like that then try to sell them straight away on your core product.
Don't be afraid of giving away some value. Once you establish yourself as the expert, it takes more work for people to do it themselves than to hire you.
Focus on getting people in the top of your funnel. Do the broadcast stuff to get them into the funnel. They will walk down the funnel on their own.

20:50 - What categories of freelancers can take this approach?

It only doesn't work for people who are doing something really B2C, like a freelance DJ.
When you sell yourself as a swinger of tools, you will have trouble with this.
Don't let your work become commoditized by being one step away from selling a service that a computer could do. You must add extra value.
I hired somebody just like this. I got an email from a subscriber once who agreed to help me product my courses. But he added a ton of extra value and I hired him because of the extra services that he was able to provide. His understanding of my end-goal is what made it valuable. I paid him 20x the local people because of the extra value he communicated.
How can you give your clients a better product.
Don't focus on the features of your products. Focus on what the buyer needs.

29:20 - If I'm a freelancer developing a course, what are some steps I need to take to go from zero to selling a course?

Build off of stuff you have already done.
I turned existing content into DoubleYourFreelancing
Go through your notes from previous clients and find content you can make and deliver based on those notes.
You can determine whether it should be a paid product or a free product based on notes from your past customers. How much do they need this?

32:50 - How much time does it take to go from no course to course?

My course has been done and redone two dozen times.
Start with something and you can build on it.
Send out surveys. You will get a lot of data.
Ask people why they signed up for your course to begin with. Listen to what people want.
You're not aiming for perfection on day one.

35:50 - So, get the first course out there and then get feedback.

Most content tends to be a monologue. Every time you talk with a new prospect or lead you can learn about new needs.
When you uncover needs, figure out how you can solve the problems in a scalable way.
This helps prepare people mentally for your services.
With this funnel you then only need to focus on getting people into the front of the funnel.

38:50 - Why do freelancers generally struggle to make the money they should be making?

The typical way freelancers determine what they should be paid is to look at what they used to make at their full-time job.
Sometimes they use online calculators.
These methods are wrong.
What you should do is understand the value of your services to the businesses you serve.
Understand the amount of return you help your clients get. The return on investment that you can provide determines how high you can price your services.
The smart freelancers are the ones who know what they can do that the typical employee can't and how to come in as a consultant not just an implementer of tools.

41:40 - So you can stop the cycle of reducing the cost of your services by focusing on business needs and goals of your clients.

You're still doing your core business, but what is being bought is different.
They're no longer buying a commodity from you, but a thought-out service.
This also gives freelancers more creative freedom, which everybody wants.

43:15 - Q&A with SendOwl

In Owl Language “What tools can people use online to distribute courses and campaigns?”

Put a post script in your newsletter to gather feedback about how much interest there is in your service. Let your customers determine how they want to buy your offer.
You can use SendOwl or another ecommerce tool to gather purchase funds from those that buy your tool.
The important thing is to figure out early on how much people will pay for your course or campaign first.
You can take preorders if your course isn't ready yet.
I put together a Trello board and invited my potential customers to comment on what they want out of my lesson plans. That even helped in creating the lessons.

48:00 - How can freelancers reach you for help?

DoubleYourFreelancing.com
Reach me on Twitter! @BrennanDunn

49:10 - Wrap up additional resources and contact information

Visit SendOwl.com/POD to get a 30 day free trial of SendOwl.

If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Digital Hustle podcast on iTunes and the SendOwl channel on YouTube.

Episode 3 - How to build a niche online community, with Dan Comerchero from The Pro Audio Files

2017-03-28T00:00:00Z

"Find how to work smart in your own business whether that's setting up new systems that bring great people in to do things that you don't need to be doing, or aren't as good at doing - but also hustling your face off with those things. When you see something that works in your business, go 1000% in!”

Intro: Hello everyone and welcome to the SendOwl Digital Hustle podcast. Just pretend that you've accidently tapped into a telephone conversation with people that are sharing intimate details about how they found success on the internet.

I’m James Milliron from SendOwl, if you want to make waves with your ecommerce business, keep listening.

Our goal is to help you uncover new ideas and tools to add to your online sales strategy and that through the experience of our expert guests.

You can learn more about SendOwl by visiting SendOwl.com where you will find a 30-day free trial waiting just for you.

So, thank you everybody for tuning in. Do subscribe to our podcast feed on iTunes or SendOwl channel on YouTube to stay up to date on future episodes.

Without further ado, let’s get into it, our topic of discussion today is about how Dan Comerchero built a niche online community for recording artists, and how he monetized it. I do have Dan here with me today. Dan thanks for joining us. How are you?

Dan Comerchero: Hey good, thanks for having me.

James Milliron: And I must say that I'm a bit terrified to be inviting onto one of our first podcast episodes somebody who is an expert in recording. That's just a tiny bit intimidating so I hope you will take it easy on me today!

2:30 – Introduction to The Pro Audio Files.

A website and community that teaches people how to mix record and master music.
600 free articles plus more in-depth courses.
We teach people how to mix and record music.
10 contributors to produce articles and videos.
Our goal is only to get people involved that I fully trust and respect so I can give them complete creative freedom to do their thing.
That facilitates creativity

6:00 - How does giving your contributors full freedom contribute to your business?

It contributes to the quality of our content.
When you build a niche online business, every contributor brings their own flavour to the table.
It ensures that I can get the highest quality content created.
Quality content can generate the most revenue.

7:15 - Who is Pro Audio Files for? Who should sign up?

Beginner and intermediate audio engineers
People with home studios
People producing their own music
Electronic producers
Musicians who want to learn more about mixing and recording
It's important to stay focused in your niche. We do that at Pro Audio Files

9:15 - If you don't keep a niche focus for the long run you might find that people unsubscribe and lose interest. A niche focus helps retain the audience.

Be aware of adjacent niches also.
Adjacent knowledge can be very useful but if you get too far away from the core niche business then people may walk away.
We want to reach as many people possible without alienating our core subscribers.

11:00 - When did you start Pro Audio Files?

Seven years ago in 2010
I started it in college
I was working on an ear training app and I thought "I think it would be cool to release articles about mixing and recording so I can have a banner ad for my app on the sidebar."
I didn't even know what content marketing was.
Blogs were different back then. Today, many people want to publish on 3rd party platforms like Medium, but there's something to be said for hosting your own content. I wanted to do that.
I made a post on a forum and asked a group of audio engineers to contribute to my website and I said I would pay them.
It was a win/win because I got great content for my site and my contributors also got to promote their own personal brands.
Online, you can make things happen so quickly!
One of our great contributors, David Glenn, somebody retweeted one of his tweets. I watched one of his YouTube videos and then sent him a DM on twitter to say, "Hey I loved your video. Would you be interested in getting involved with the site? You can build your brand and we can pay you."
20 Seconds later David got back to me and said "Hey I love your site. I follow it. Let's do it."
Don't let an opportunity pass you by because you are afraid of hearing "no."
Just send the message or make the call and you'll be surprised how many people will say "yes."

15:45 - Sometimes people get social anxiety, like millennials. We don't always feel comfortable reaching out to people.

I've had success enough times reaching out to people that I can override it or go to my therapist more often. haha
We put people on pedestals too often.
Even in audio we have "A list" engineers that seem unapproachable but they're really not.
People are people. Send one email and they are down to do it.
If I never posted on that forum and met Matthew Weiss, I would have a totally different business.
I could have so easily not have sent that message...
If you're listening right now and there's somebody in your head that you think "I would love to do business with that person..." Just reach out and make it happen.

17:30 - Is Pro Audio Files your first entrepreneurial venture?

I was in school for music production and interested in learning about audio.
I thought that I could promote this app that I had just made which is made for readers of this blog, and I would also learn a lot about audio at the same time.
Not only would I learn, but I would develop a platform to promote my app.
Outside of this, there was no other foresight.
It's important to be open to your project or business changing into something else.
You might have a vision but you have to be open to that changing over time.
Eventually our site became monetized!
I love the process of idea to execution. That's where I'm happiest. Pro Audio Files was the one idea that blossomed into something that I could make a living from.
Some of the best business opportunities are things you need for yourself. Problems you need to solve. That's where you can build a niche online business.

21:15 - The Pro Audio Files has a monthly membership subscription. What other revenue streams are connected to this business?

The main expense is getting high quality content on the site.
For two or three years all I was doing was promoting the app through the site. That was great because it didn't fall into the app store abyss.
I couldn't make a living off of it back then.
Somebody approached me and said they wanted to put a banner ad on my site. I was ecstatic!
Back in the day it was bliss to get 1000 visitors to the website.
When we got the banner ad proposal for a couple hundred dollars per month I was excited.
Fast forward a couple years. We had a lot of interest in how to mix hip-hop. We had a lot of organic Google traffic coming from these terms. Matt wanted to make a paid course on this. So we decided to do it.
We made a landing page and packaged the course. We were charging way too little for it but we made a couple thousand dollars and were hyped because the site was making money.
Now we have 15 or 20 paid courses, the membership site, and ad revenue coming from Google.
Every couple of years we keep pushing it forward and test what is and isn't working.
Don't become too romantic about an idea. Test it and if it works do it. If it doesn't, move on.
When I hired an editor it freed me up to do things other than editing the site. That was a big win for us.
Figure out how to put systems in place that help you scale to your business goals.

27:15 - As you build a niche online business, do you offload or outsource the tasks that you don't like to do or do you offload tasks that you're not good at?

You can't just outsource things you don't like.
There are some very specific things that only you can do.
It doesn't make sense for me to outsource business development.
Tasks that I don't enjoy and also don't require a specific skill that only I have, that is something I can outsource.
Entrepreneurs struggle with being control freaks, but you have to offload tasks to grow.

29:20 - What ecommerce tools are you using to sell online?

We use WordPress for the blog and membership site.
We sell all the products on SendOwl.
We use Member Mouse for our membership site.

30:10 - What about other people that use your website. Do you have members of your community that are selling their work online?

The music industry is really tough. It's hard to make money.
I switched from music performance to music production was because it felt more tangible and lucrative.
It's important to have your hand in a lot of different things.
A lot of people using our site are running their own studios.
You can purchase the complete bundle of courses from Matthew Weiss for $350 and get full access to Q&A and everything. You don't have to go to college for it anymore if you don't want to. Obtaining the knowledge is much easier.
People are making money off of what they learn at Pro Audio Files.

33:15 - How might SendOwl customers use Pro Audio Files to get help with their creations?

Pro Audio Files can help any musician expand on their skillset so that they can produce better tracks faster.
For under $1000 you can have your own rig. A midi controller, an interface, a single microphone and an instrument are all you need to create great stuff.
There's no stigma attached to being a "bedroom producer."
You can use Pro Audio Files to expand your knowledge and make better music.
One great idea to do: If you read an article you like on a website, reach out to the author and see what you can do together. You never know!

36:30 - Tell me about your experience with SendOwl.

I love SendOwl
I switched to SendOwl from the first ecommerce platform that we used.
I appreciate the thoughtful UI and design.
I switched everyone with an audio website over to SendOwl so I could take advantage of the affiliate program.
I also think it's cool that George, the founder, does customer service and I get messages from him.

38:40 - What's it like to start a niche community?

I don't really know what it's like to start a business with a broad reach. I sometimes wonder if that increases the fad factor.
It's easier to build a tight-nit community when it's a niche thing. Everybody is passionate about it.

40:00 - At what point did you have to put in the most hustle to overcome a slow time?

Every day! I have to remind myself to keep going at it.
It's scary running your own business because there's no net underneath.
I have to constantly remind myself not to let the good things make me complacent.
I hustle on different aspects of the business to keep pushing it forward.
I reinvest every cent that I have into it and I put every day into it.
You have to meditate on "what's the best use of my time right now?"
Make sure you hustle in the right places.

43:10 - Our listeners are always looking for a cool new marketing idea. What was one marketing thing that you did which propelled your business forward?

If you run your own business and you have video but you're not transcribing the video, that's a huge missed opportunity.
We transcribe the video and upload it all on YouTube. We keep the full transcript because Google can't understand the words in the video, but the transcription can be indexed.
That's been a big SEO win lately.
Also, find what you're good at and go all in on that. For us, that was Facebook Ads.

45:30 - What is better? To dabble in a number of different marketing ideas to see what works, or should you go after one specific marketing idea at a time and go all in with it?

What do you enjoy and what do you think is sustainable?
When I get into something and enjoy it, I can go all in and focus on it.
Test a lot of things at first before you go all in.
You don't need the quantity if you set up the right funnels for it.
Notes in this section about maximizing what is already working.
It doesn't matter if the content is old. If it's a new audience to target, it's new to them.

50:30 - The best content in the world that you can turn into a business is quality. It's not free, it's sold.

We'll put out a quick tip on YouTube, but it's not the full picture. They watch the free video, see the style of the video and the quality of the education, then they end up on the course page with testimonials. Then the next step is to sign up.

53:00 - A fun question, have you met any celebrities?

I've met people that are mixing pop tracks on the radio. They're all just super cool normal people. Accessible and not on a pedestal.
One of the first backlinks we got was from DJ 8-Track. He had a blog and he linked to our article.
I reached out to a few respected audio engineers and they agreed to do interviews. Everyone can help each other with mutual value.
Everyone is connected online these days.

55:15 - Q&A with SendOwl

In Owl Language “Do you follow Gary Vee and Tai Lopez on YouTube?”

Gary V is all about Hustle Hustle Hustle.
Tai Lopez is all about don't work harder, work smarter.
There was a war between the two of them online which was funny.
Actually though, it's finding a middle ground between the two to make your business successful.
Find something that works and go 1000% in on it.

58:20 - Where can people find more information about Pro Audio Files and how to get in touch?

TheProAudioFiles.com

1:00:00 - Wrap up additional resources and contact information

Visit SendOwl.com/POD to get a 30 day free trial of SendOwl.

If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Digital Hustle podcast on iTunes and the SendOwl channel on YouTube.

How much should I charge for my digital product?

How to Sell Codes Online

2017-03-21T00:00:00Z

Selling codes online can be a simple and easy way to make money, provided you follow a few simple rules. In this article, we'll look at what codes you can sell, where you can sell them and how you should sell them.

If you are looking for information on how to sell digital goods with serial/license keys, to prevent fraud, easily upgrade customers from free trials and share Steam license keys, then read the blog post on license keys instead.

What codes can you sell online?

You can bulk buy vouchers for retailers like Amazon and iTunes and then sell online for a modest discount. Or you can use your prowess in online gaming to accumulate characters or currencies that can be traded for money in the 'real' world via a code. Or you can sell vouchers for video rentals to avid movie fans. The possibilities are almost endless.

Where can you sell codes online?

You've got a number of choices, including:

eBay – it can feel like the wild west of the internet but you can buy or sell almost anything but you can't arrange automatic delivery of the code after purchase, which might annoy customers who want the product immediately.
By using 'specialist' gift card services like Zeek. Although having to get your customers to sign up for a Zeek account first is a bit of a hurdle.
On specialist forums – although having to individually email each customer can be time consuming for a business usually based on bulk selling and tight margins.
By using a digital download service like SendOwl, which means that you can sell codes from your own website, blog, using a sales description page, or pretty much anywhere you can paste a link. The main advantage of using a digital delivery company is that delivery of codes is fast and automated.

How you should sell codes online

You'll need to work hard to reassure customers that you're trustworthy because there are code sellers out there who are not – and who rip off customers. To make yourself stand out as a reputable seller:

Make sure your blog, website or social media has useful, targeted and well written content
Include testimonials from happy customers or publications that like what you do
Respond to any queries via email or social media as soon as possible
Offer to post codes as well if this is typical in your niche
Include details of your company, contact details and possibly your business address so customers can see you actually exist

Getting started selling codes online

You don't need $100,000 and a team of investors to start selling codes online. Start with a few codes and a fairly good idea of who will buy them and where they hang out. Create a basic website or sales description page with some quality, targeted content. And then see what happens.

The Art of Creating a Magnetic Value Proposition

Episode 2 - How to increase online sales conversion rates

2017-03-21T00:00:00Z

"Do we accept Beak Coins? Are Beak Coins the currency of the digital owls surfing around the internet? Yes, they are!”

Intro: Hello everyone and welcome to the SendOwl Digital Hustle podcast the show where we get deep into the details and sometimes into the weeds with today’s movers and shakers in the online space.

I’m James Milliron from SendOwl, if you want to make waves with your ecommerce business you have tuned into the right frequency.

Our goal is to help you uncover new ideas and tools to add to your online sales strategy and that through the experience of our expert guests.

You can learn more about SendOwl by visiting SendOwl.com where you will find a 30-day free trial waiting just for you.

So, thank you everybody for tuning in. Do subscribe to our podcast feed on iTunes or on the SendOwl channel on YouTube to stay up to date on future episodes.

So, let’s get into it, our topic of discussion today how to increase digital sales conversion rates. And guess who’s back! George Palmer back again on his own podcast, the founder of SendOwl! Welcome back George!

George Palmer: Thank you very much. I am yet again humbled that you are having me back on the podcast of the company that I founded.

James Milliron: Why don’t we jump in here. We’re talking about digital sales conversion rates. That can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. George, how would you define digital sales conversion rates in your own words?

2:00 – How to define digital sales conversion rates.

There are two conversion rates people talk about.
One: True conversion rates. The number of visitors that come to your site versus the number that sign up.
Two: Cart conversion rates. The number of people who click on buy product versus the number of people that actually complete the checkout.

3:30 – We are not talking about marketing conversion rates. We are talking about making an actual sale.

Marketing conversion rates can help increase your sales. But you’re not getting paid for those so for today we’re talking about converting visitors that have already made it to your site.

4:15 – Why is it important to measure conversion rates at all?

What gets measured gets managed
Start measuring so you can start tweaking

5:10 – What is a “good” conversion rate?

There is no correct answer…
Amazon has 8% conversion rates – a very low number.
SendOwl sellers drive targeted traffic and sell a specialized product. Those conversion rates on a personalized site end up being a lot higher. It’s possible to hit 30% plus.
Advertising can decrease conversion rates but increase sales.
It can be complicated and confusing. So, we’ll talk about it.
Set up conversion rate tracking now so you can start monitoring results now.

8:30 – How can I improve my conversion rate?

One: Increase the number of people that buy.
Two: Increase the number of people visiting your site.
Design is important depending on how technical your audience is.
The aim of design is to get people to focus on what is important on the page. The product, the values, the social proof. Design well to look like you know what you are doing.
When we redesigned our website, we changed the design and not the copy, and the design alone had a 40% lift in conversion rates.
Copy/Content. The words you use communicate your unique angle in the market.
Most people buy emotionally, not logically. If you can connect with them emotionally through good copy, you can increase your conversion rates drastically.
Checkout Process. People think there is a “best checkout” that will work out for all domains. That’s just not true.
Customization for checkouts is important.
The less technical the audience, the more they are expecting to enter things like postal address, regardless of whether they need to for a digital item.
Trust icons are very important.

16:00 – What should I say on my checkout page? Is there an optimized way to go about communicating my product properly?

Show don’t tell.
Don’t just say you have good customer support if you think you have it. Demonstrate it with a quote.
If you are selling an eBook, show a page or two of your eBook so they can see the quality of what they are purchasing.
Also, talk in terms of benefits instead of just talking about features.
Super Mario reference: Feature is you can eat a flower. Benefit is you can destroy more monsters.

22:15 – What are some ways people can use media to increase sales conversions?

A picture is worth a thousand words. A photo can communicate a lot.
Video is a step up from images. If possible experiment with communicating big ideas in video.
Just don’t be excessive. If there is too much on the page, people can get distracted and lose focus on buying.
Don’t link to other sites. People will leave your page and you will lose sales.
Show them the benefits of your product.

23:30 – What can we do to increase the credibility of our brand?

Social proof is the classic example.
Reviews. Testimonials. Quotes from influencers in your sector.
If a physical store you can see the products and the vibe with your own eyes. You don’t get that on the internet. So, reviews really come into play on the web.

28:00 – How do I make a good call to action?

Colors of buttons don’t make much of a difference. The most important part is that the button stands out.
A/B testing button colors will mostly be a waste of time.
The copy that you use on the button does make a big difference such as “buy now” or “only 16 remaining.”
You’re much better spending your time on the page content because once somebody sees the call to action button they have already made their decision based on website content.

30:45 – How important is mobile optimization?

This year (2017) Google will be favoring mobile optimized checkouts.
Shopify announced last year that more people are checking out on mobile than desktop.

32:00 – How does website loading time affect sales conversion rates?

A 200 millisecond slower loading speed can cause big losses in page engagement. That will absolutely cause your conversions to drop.
It’s also incredibly frustrating using a slow website. So, don’t irritate your buyers with a slow site.

34:00 – Does image optimization and cleanliness of code affect conversion rates? Is it more of a problem with SEO or is it about customer frustration?

If you use big images, you will have a slower site. It would affect your SEO ranking also which would reduce your incoming traffic.
Major structural issues with your site will hurt the usability of your site which would obviously affect conversion rates.

35:40 – How can we set a good expectation at the beginning of the checkout experience so people will complete the buying process?

The type of checkout you use depends on the audience.
If your buyers are technical all you’ll need is a credit card and an email address.
If you’re selling a carpentry product to people are retired, you’ll also want to capture a postal address, contact number, and trust symbols. Because this is what that crowd is used to.
Know your audience and match to their expectations.
If you’re not sure about that, research where they hang out online.

38:00 – Do people actually care about trust symbols?

Trust symbols mean absolutely nothing… but they do reassure many non-technical buyers. So, they do serve a purpose.

39:10 – Is it physically possible to give a completely custom tailored checkout experience for your buyers?

PayPal doesn’t give you much customization.
Something like SendOwl can let you customize colors, add your logo, remove fields, add fields, and several other things to get your checking matching your brand.
It’s always better to reinforce your brand and color scheme.

40:40 - How can we make sure that people understand what they are going to pay at the end of the checkout experience? Considering things like sales tax and shipping.

People want to know what they’re getting into in regard to pricing.
It’s always good to give them some idea of what the cost will be on the first page.
Don’t try to be sneaky and bolt on extra costs on the end.
If you think buyers will need to pay extra shipping costs because of location, feel free to make a note about it.
Some people do leave a checkout if they get ambushed by increased costs at the end.

43:45 - Do payment methods affect conversion rates?

Absolutely. This is huge.
People already know at the beginning of the checkout experience how they wish to pay.
If you only limit your checkout to PayPal processing, you’ll lose a lot of business.
Give them a choice. There are a lot of people who love PayPal and will only use PayPal. Others hate them. Give them options.
Adding additional payment methods will massively increase your conversion rates.
There are alternative payment methods like Bitcoin and Apple Pay. When we added Apple Pay to SendOwl’s checkout as an option it significantly increased conversions for a lot of people. Now you don’t have to enter in any credit card or address information. It’s just a finger print scan and your purchase is done.
A lot of countries also have specific payment solutions. So, if you are doing business globally you should find ways to integrate those local payment methods.

48:00 - Many people leave the checkout process before they click “pay.” How do we bring them back?

Cart abandonment tools are the key to brining people back.
Send them a discount offer to complete their purchase.
Send them an email to remind them to come back and buy.
A simple reminder or a discount code can bring a lot of buyers back.
Cart abandonment takes 60 seconds to set up. In the worst-case scenario, you won’t get any sales. In the best-case scenario, you will get a lot of extra sales.

50:20 - Let’s say that someone is 100% convinced to buy. We have a guaranteed conversion. Is there anything we can do within the checkout experience that can bring in more revenue per sale?

Upsells are my favorite.
When somebody buys product “x” you offer them product “y” for additional money.
You can have them switch from “X” to “Y” or you can offer them “Y” in addition to “X”.
The best upsell tools will even let you upsell somebody after they’ve already pressed the “buy” button. They’ve already put the card in, so the upsell is immediate.

54:30 – Q&A with SendOwl

In Owl Language “How much can you customize the checkout with SendOwl?”

You can manipulate the HTML and CSS.
I’ve seen SendOwl checkouts that I didn’t recognize because people were able to customize the checkout so much.

In Owl Language “Do we accept Beak Coins? Are Beak Coins the currency of the digital owls surfing around the internet?”

Beak Coins are not translatable into to dollars or pounds so we can’t consider using them at this time.

57:00 – Wrap up additional resources and contact information

Visit SendOwl.com/POD to get a 30 day free trial of SendOwl.

If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Digital Hustle podcast on iTunes and the SendOwl channel on YouTube.

One Click Upsells

How much should I charge for my digital product?

Episode 1 - How to publish and sell an ebook

2017-03-14T00:00:00Z

"So if you’re selling a product at 5000 euros you probably only need to sell two of those a month and you have yourself a full-time business.”

I’m James Milliron from SendOwl, and if you want to make waves with your ecommerce business you have tuned into the right frequency.

Our goal is to help you uncover new ideas and tools to add to your online sales strategy and that through the experience of our expert guests.

This podcast is hosted by SendOwl the leading digital sales and delivery application for entrepreneurs who want to increase their online sales conversion rates, to provide a seamless checkout experience for their buyers, and for those who want to get setup up and selling in under 5 minutes.

You can learn more about SendOwl by visiting sendowl.com/pod where you will find a 30 day free trail waiting just for you.

So thank you everybody for tuning in. Do subscribe to the podcast feed on iTunes or on the SendOwl channel on YouTube to stay up to date on future episodes.

So let’s get into it, our topic of discussion today is how to publish and sell an ebook and today we're kicking off our first podcast with our very own George Palmer the owner and founder of SendOwl.

What’s happening George?!

George Palmer: Hi James thanks for having me and it’s very strange to be invited as a guest to a podcast for my own company.

James Milliron: I’m actually really excited to have you speaking to kick off even though we have a great line up of future podcast guests, because digital hustle is something you know a lot about. Why don’t we start off by giving the listeners a quick intro on how you started SendOwl and how it relates to our topic of ebooks.

2:15 – How George Palmer started SendOwl as a means to sell his eBook

4:50 – Agenda and introduction to the main content

What you should do before you start writing your eBook
What you should do during the process of writing your eBook
How to prepare for publication
Pricing and publishing your eBook
Distribution
Go to market strategy
How to maximize all the efforts you’ve made after the launch

5:25 – How can someone go about finding a good eBook idea?

Determine what you’re good at.
It’s easy to forget that the average person on the street doesn’t know as much as you do about your choice topic.
Take your knowledge and get it into a really accessible form.

8:15 – If I’m writing an eBook should I choose a topic that I think will sell or should I choose a topic that I enjoy writing about? What’s the balance?

If you choose an extremely niche topic that only 100 people are interested in, you will have a hard time.
So you should consider that your topic is sellable.
Out of the two options, you should still choose something you enjoy writing about or you will hit a wall.

10:00 – Should I use my own name or an alias/stage name?

It’s personal choice but personal brand will become more and more important as time goes on.
Only choose a pen name if there is some conflict of interest in your life that would make it so your book shouldn’t have your name attached to it.

10:50 – How do I come up with a good title?

Leave it to the end. You have 3 to 5 words to get across the content and your unique angle.
Ask someone who is good with words to help you with it.
Don’t get too hung up on titles before you start writing.

12:20 – Is there any way to know whether or not my book will be successful before I begin? Are there any tests I can do to gauge the market?

Throw $100 at Google AdWords
Bid on the keywords you’re interested in.
Send people to a simple Wix page.
Create a buy button.
When they click it, say you’re not ready yet but leave your email and we’ll notify you when it’s ready.
This will give you an idea of the conversion rate you might get from your website eBook.
This will help you see if the market fit is wrong or if there are enough people interested.

15:00 – I have a lot of ideas about my next upcoming eBook. Should I just start writing or do I need a plan?

When you have the enthusiasm, start writing. But don’t write the whole book like this.
Create a plan for the structure of the book so you can see how you can market it when finished.
You can’t do anything in life without a plan!

17:20 – How can we mitigate distractions while writing?

See where you can find an extra hour in your day.
Set aside that one hour with zero distractions.
Turn off technology so you can focus.
You must be dedicated to do it.
Keep resources available throughout the day so you can pen down your ideas.
If you work from home one day a week, use your commute as writing time.

22:10 – Is there anything else I can do while writing my eBook to start building awareness? Is this the right time to start doing these activities?

Build a community of followers ASAP.
Offline communities convert faster, so try to build relationships in the community.
The benefit of an online audience is it scales faster.
Hang out in places where your consumers will be.
Get involved in Facebook groups, Twitter, etc.
Once your book is ready you can market to these people.
You can use this as a platform to start gathering feedback for your book so you can make changes.
You might also get testimonials about the quality of your book by sharing a first draft with influencers.

26:30 – We have a first draft ready. What else should I do before I’m ready for publication.

Think about graphics for your book, should you hire or buy the rights to existing images?
Hire a proofreader.
Think about how you will convert it into something sellable.
Start preparing a go-to-market plan.

28:00 – What’s the best file format to use for publishing an eBook

There are 3 formats: .PDF, .MOBI and .EPUB
Never publish a finished version in Microsoft Word or another editable format.

29:55 – How do we get our finished eBook in front of an audience.

Option 1: Sell via marketplace by using something like Amazon.
- Amazon would take 30% – 70% of your profit.
- They give you a platform for people to search for your eBook.
- Another downside is you don’t get to keep data on your buyers. You miss out on email data and other useful stats.
Option 2: Sell direct from your own website.
- In this way you can save all the email and customer data.
- You get to upsell and cross-sell other products to them later.
- You get complete control on your pricing.
- If you sell direct you can sell eBooks at prices up to and over $100.
- More details in this section about eBook sales math.
- One example here about an eBook writer who made a fortune on his 100 page book at a very high price.

37:30 – Other preparations for a go-to-market launch

Hype around your product creates desirability. Setting a launch date can be helpful for this.
Announce to social media.
Announce to your email list.
Set up affiliate deals to get others talking about your eBook.
Get your “buy button” live on your own website.
Make it all happen on one day!

40:00 – What are some tips that we can use to maximize the effort of our sales post launch?

Get your buyers on a mailing list so you can sell to them again in the future.
Create a secondary product on a similar topic to use as an upsell.
It’s easier to sell to an existing customer than a brand new one.

42:20 – Q&A with SendOwl

In Owl Language “What is the most innovate eBook that anyone has ever created?”

Colored Pencil Magazine

In Owl Language “What is the most expensive eBook you’ve seen?”

Market research report on mobile phone apps. Sells for EUR 5000.

45:30 – Additional resources

Blog articles
PDF file creators
Get started now! Get stuff done!

46:30 – Wrap up and contact information

Visit SendOwl.com/POD to get a 30 day free trial of SendOwl.

If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Digital Hustle podcast on iTunes and the SendOwl channel on YouTube.

(digital file delivery) 7 ways your digital file delivery provider should make your life easier

2017-03-14T00:00:00Z

If you plan to sell any kind of digital file direct from your website, blog or anywhere you can paste a link then you'll need to enlist the help of a digital file delivery provider. These providers should make a hard job very easy. They sort out integrating with a payment gateway, providing a secure checkout, and automatic and secure delivery of your files. This leaves you free to get on with the most important job: growing your business.

In this article we look at 7 ways your digital file delivery provider should make your life easier:

By doing three important ecommerce jobs in one
Being easy to set up and start selling
Have an elegant and accessible dashboard
Offer effective reporting and analytics
Have great customer support
Offer extra security features to prevent fraud
Give you the choice of extra marketing features to boost revenue

1. By doing three important ecommerce jobs in one

The core activities of a digital delivery file provider include: linking with your payment processor(s), providing a secure checkout and ensuring secure and automatic delivery of your files.

Payment processing

So, before you start out with a digital file delivery company you will need to sign up with a payment processor like PayPal or Stripe (which makes it super easy to process credit and debit cards). Digital file delivery companies then integrate with your favourite payment processors. A few providers will offer more payment options such as Bitcoin and ApplePay integration. This is because the more ways your customers can pay, the more likely they are to give you money. Although common in the UK and US, credit cards are not necessarily common in other countries, even in Europe. Some people also simply hate PayPal.

This type of digital file delivery provider therefore facilitates payment but does not get involved in the transaction itself. They do not own your products or claim any copyright or other legal rights over them. Be aware that some digital file providers are actually resellers of your product, which involves a different legal framework and a hefty cut of your profit.

Providing a checkout

If a customer wants to buy your digital product then you need to lead them through a series of actions where they give you their payment details and email address for delivery. This is called your checkout. Digital file delivery providers will all provide a checkout of sorts. However, what you want to look for is one that is specifically:

mobile-optimised so customers can buy on all devices
multi-language so customers can buy all over the world
streamlined so customers don't abandon carts when asked to provide extra useless information (if you sell digital files you shouldn't need a physical address. You don't even need a name.)
customisable so customers feel comfortable being sent to these pages because they look like the rest of your site
flexible so you can add trust icons, for example, if you think they will increase your conversion rate
accessible so that customers can easily choose to pay how they want

Linking up your checkout to your website, blog or social media

Most providers should give you two options:

add a button to your website or blog (such as Buy Now)
paste a link anywhere you can (including social media) that sends people directly to your checkout

Most providers expect you to ask customers to add your product to a cart, which is great if you have an online shop and want to persuade them to buy more than one product. However, if you want to persuade customers to buy your fantastic ebook after you've just given them a free chapter, for example, then you'd be better off with Buy Now functionality. Preferably look for digital file delivery providers that give you the choice of Add to Cart or Buy Now functionality so you can choose the most suitable option for your business.

Artist Amira Rahim sells quite a few digital products so needs Adds to Cart functionality.

Securely deliver your digital file

Once your customer has paid for your product, then your digital file delivery provider should automatically and securely deliver your file to them. You shouldn't need to do anything. Most providers should give your customers the chance to download the file by email or by a download link that appears straight after their payment has been processed. Other features to look out for include:

quick download speeds for your customers – you don't want them to get fed up waiting!
time-limited download links which makes them harder to be shared
maximum download attempts (that you can specify), which reduces sharing

2. Easy set up

There's no excuse for a digital file delivery provider that takes you a day to get set up: because you need to download an app, use an external landing page that doesn't really fit with your website, or simply has a terrible user interface.

Look for a provider that gets you set up quickly, and can prove this in their marketing material or in a free trial. Beware of companies that just talk about how great and easy to use they are without showing you proof!

3. Elegant dashboard

This provider is going to be an important part of your growing business, so you'll be using their dashboard regularly to check your sales, customise your experience and add new products.

Make sure that the dashboard is easy to use on all your devices (including mobile) and that you can find your way around it without needing to refer to their knowledge base every two seconds.

4.Effective reporting and analytics

Analytics isn't just inert data that you look at and forget about. It's super-exciting information that holds the key to how you can grow your business – and what you might be doing wrong.

Make sure your digital file delivery provider has decent analytics and reporting functionality otherwise you'll get frustrated when your business begins to take off.

Analytics sections should offer baseline features such as the ability to see your sales over a selected time period, how many of your orders are started and completed, and income per product. They should also help you with more granular insights, for example:

How much extra revenue in-built marketing features like one-click upsells and gifting are generating
Where do your most profitable customers live?
What's your average order value?
How much will you make next month from subscriptions?
Cashflow with subscriptions, and refunds identified separately should you with

Your analytics section should help you identify ways to grow your business

5.Great customer support

There will almost always be a point when you need customer support, because you have a query or question that is specific to your business. You want to be able to get a helpful response from customer support quickly, so check that your potential provider has a good reputation in this field.

Also, browse their knowledge base articles. These should help you navigate sometimes quite complex topics quickly and easily. If they don't, then you'll end up wasting time getting something wrong or waiting on customer support to get back to you.

Useful knowledge base articles:

Use clear non-technical language
Offer a video walkthrough as well as a screenshot walkthrough
Help you understand use cases and exceptions
Point you in the direction of related content that could be relevant

6.Extra security features to prevent fraud

Part of your reason for using a digital file delivery provider is that they offer a secure way of selling and distributing your product. After all, you didn't create a great video series or ebook only for people to rip it off in two seconds. Some digital file delivery providers will go one step further to help you keep your product secure. These include:

video streaming – often popular with customers and much more secure for you
PDF stamping – which discourages illegal sharing without penalising loyal customers
license keys – keep software and other digital files secure
fraud filtering – so you can filter out offenders by their country of residence, IP address or email
secure by design – if your provider is built by software experts rather than marketers, for example, it is more likely to be secure by design
two factor authentication (2FA) – so that if your email gets hacked your account is still secure

Two factor authentication will keep your account secure

7.Extra marketing features to boost revenue

Most digital delivery providers recognise that everyone needs help with growing their business. Those that are serious about helping customers put a rocket under their revenue will offer marketing features such as these:

a built in affiliate scheme – so you get other people to sell your products
discounts – so you can encourage people to make a purchase NOW
Pay what you want pricing – an effective marketing tactic for many companies
cart abandonment – a great way to recover lost sales
one click upsells – get people to give you more money without spending an extra cent on marketing
gifting – so your customers can buy products as a gift for friends and family

One click upsells can boost revenue with no extra marketing spend

How to choose a pricing structure

Digital delivery providers tend to fall into two categories: those that charge a flat fee per month and those that charge a % per transaction. The latter can seem enticing if you are hesitant about how much you will sell. And they are a good option for low volume sellers.

However, if you are serious about growing your business consider whether a monthly payment might actually be better value. With a monthly payment, you won't be penalised for selling more and you know exactly how much you will be spending on digital delivery every month.

If you make between $200-$300 a month it is usually better value to pay a monthly rather than a per transaction fee.

Comparison chart between four different digital delivery companies

The only digital delivery provider to offer two-factor authentication/2FA

2017-03-08T00:00:00Z

Have you ever had your email account hacked? Hopefully not, but if you have then you know the problems. Hackers can pillage your email for sensitive or valuable information. And with just an email they can reset your password to gain access to the different services you use, including SendOwl. To prevent this scenario, we're set up two-factor authentication to keep your account as secure as possible.

How does two-factor authentication (2FA) work?

Download an authenticator

You download an authenticator app like Google Authenticator or Authy on your phone or tablet

Enable two-factor authentication for SendOwl

Go in to your SendOwl profile (Settings -> Profile) and click the enable two factor authentication link.

We'll share with you a secret password encoded as a QR code for ease of use (or long form if you prefer)
To set SendOwl up as an account on your authenticator you then simply scan the QR code with your authenticator app
Your authenticator app will provide you with a code that you enter on the SendOwl two factor authentication page – so we can check the process is working
You choose a recovery passphrase so that if you lose your phone, for example, we can easily sort your account out for you. This is optional but recommended. Authy, for example, works across multiple devices so losing your phone is less problematic.
We send you an email confirming that you've set up two factor authentication

Login securely

The next time you login to SendOwl you now have to enter your email and password as usual, and then enter the code generated by your vaidator. This provides an additional level of security for your account as if your email/password is compromised they still won't be able to access your account without your phone.

Try out two-factor authentication (2FA)

If you don't already use two-factor authentication (2FA) then why not give it a go? It's easy to set up and equally easy to disable. We reckon that before you know it though, you'll be using two-factor authentication for all your sensitive information as online security becomes ever more important.

Cart Abandonments

2017-02-27T00:00:00Z

You spend a lot of time and effort getting someone to your website. Then you spend even more time and effort persuading them to make a purchase. So there's nothing more soul crushing than watching them abandon their cart actually at the checkout stage. With a little help from SendOwl though, you can rescue these orders. Read on.

Options for rescuing the order

There's several ways in which SendOwl can rescue a cart abandonment:

A customer has entered their email before abandoning the cart

If a customer abandoned an order after they've given you their email address then you have a few options:

You can send them an automated email after a specified time delay
You can sign them up to a mailing list (SendOwl integrates with over 10 email services)
You can use Mailchimp's abandoned cart feature

A customer hasn't entered their email before abandoning the cart

In this case, you can either refocus them on your offer before they exit or track them down afterwards. Your options are:

Entice your customer to stay with an exit pop-up showing a discount
Persuade your customer to give you another chance with an exit pop-up that shows extra content – maybe a YouTube video?
Trigger some Javascript, which allows you to retarget customers with Facebook adverts, for example

Find out how well the abandoned orders feature is working for you

If you go to your SendOwl Analytics you'll be able to see how many times your buyers have abandoned their carts, how many orders were rescued, and how much extra money you've made.

With this data, you should be able to optimise this feature to make you as much money as possible.

Watch the extra revenue roll in

According to Hubspot, 20% of cart abandoners return and purchase after retargetting. That's a lot of extra revenue for a fairly minimal amount of work.

We'll be keeping track of how much extra our sellers make from rescuing abandoned orders. Watch out for our data post on the subject.

Already a SendOwl customer? Check out our help article to see how you can get started with cart abandonment.

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How to sell online memberships/subscriptions (includes helpful case studies)

2017-02-20T00:00:00Z

Selling a one-off digital product, service or course may offer you instant gratification. You get an email saying you've made a sale and the money turns up in your bank account. However, you then need to work hard to get a new customer to make a purchase. This costs time and money. So why not try maximising your revenue – and easing your cash flow – by persuading customers to sign up to a membership/subscription? That way your initial marketing investment pays off month after month after month. Nice!

Advantages of selling memberships/subscriptions rather than one-off digital products

Get recurring revenue
Maximise profit per customer
Reduce spend/effort chasing new customers
Ease cash flow
Sustainable business model: the more content you create the more attractive membership will become to new customers

What you can sell through a membership/subscription

You can sell almost any kind of product or service through an online membership/subscription model. The only real limit is your imagination. Here are a few case studies to help inspire you.

Digital publications

Instead of – or even as well as – selling publications individually you can charge a membership fee so your customers can access your content as soon as you produce it.

This is the strategy of Ann Kullberg who sells access to her coloured pencil magazine, as well as selling individual digital products.

You can read about how Ann turned her passion for art into a career in this interview (8 min read).

Consultancy services

If you are an authority in your field then you can create a business around selling content to people who want to learn your skills.

For example, if you are an expert digital marketer you can sell content to aspiring marketers, sole traders and small businesses about how to achieve 5x growth in a month.

Or if you're a communications expert you can sell content to education leaders who want to level up their skills without taking time off to go to a week-long conference somewhere.

Although selling your content as a one-off online course could work well for you, selling an online membership will bring you that holy grail of recurring revenue.

Dan O'Connor is a communications expert. He sells membership to a certification programme on professional communications skills training. He offers a 7-day free trial to try and persuade people to try his content and then sign up as a member.

Access to a community or forum

If you manage to create a useful, targeted and lively community or forum them customers will give you money for having recurring access.

Chris Ducker runs the YouPreneur community and charges around $60 a month for access.

Dressage instruction (how to make horses dance)

Okay, I included this as an edge case to show how you can sell almost any kind of online content using a membership model.

The Dressage Pro website offers two online courses: for their 'From Basic to Grand Prix course' and 'The 4 factors in Better Focus in the Ring'. Enrollment is only open in the spring and autumn, a supply restriction that gives a sense of urgency and exclusivity to the content.

How you can sell subscriptions/memberships

You have a number of options, including:

You charge a recurring fee for access to all, or a subset, of your products
You release new articles/videos/mp3's on a regular basis and give access to them for a set, recurring fee

Using a digital delivery service

Although your first thought is probably to start googling 'memberships service' a digital delivery company may actually give you all the functionality you need to sell memberships/subscriptions. This is particularly the case if you want to 'drip' content to your customers rather than create a members-only area.

For example, with SendOwl you can control:

How often your customer pays
Whether they pay for a set number of occurrences or on-going
Whether you set a trial period (which could be free)
What you sell i.e. tangible product, service or digital product (audio, videos, publications...)
How often you 'drip' content to customers
Whether customers can see all content or just a subset
And much more!

They also automatically and securely deliver your digital content to your customers, integrate with your payment processor (like Stripe or PayPal), provide an optimised-checkout, and have plenty of helpful marketing features as well.

Going back to Ann Kullberg, this is what her customers see when they select 'Subscribe'. She's added some explanatory text at the top and security icons at the bottom, so it can be even simpler if you choose.

Membership software

However, a digital delivery service like SendOwl isn't membership software. So if you want to give customers access to an online forum or community you will need to use membership software like Membership Mouse or s2Member Pro.

These services allow you to:

Create a membership area
Allow restricted access to this area, via a password for example

Services like SendOwl integrate with membership software, so you can always use both.

How you can optimise initial conversions

Selling memberships/subscriptions requires you to convince customers that they will get good value from their recurring payment – and will continue to do so.

Possible tactics to increase your conversion rate includes:

Offer a discounted or free trial
Show customers sample content or your publication/course itinerary
Only open your site to membership for a set period of time to create a sense of urgency and exclusivity
Make it easy for customers to cancel their subscription/membership – hopefully they won't but it might help allay their initial fears
Include bonus content as a free gift on signup
Make it easy for people to give you money – don't ruin all your hard work by having a cumbersome checkout

How you can increase customer's life-time value & retention

If you can reduce your churn rate and increase the average lifetime of your customers then you'll be a very happy entrepreneur indeed!

Try these ideas:

Even if you are only giving customers access to future content – your next publication for example – make sure they can see something useful as soon as they sign up. That way you get your relationship off on the right foot
Make it easy for customers to consume your content on any device, including mobiles. Don't just produce content for customers sitting down in front of a computer. They might not be!
Consider whether customers want content that they can access with an Internet connection (i.e. streamed videos) or that they can download and consume when they are offline (downloaded videos)
Listen to your customers's ideas, problems and suggestions. They can provide the foundation for new content and show that you are genuinely interested in engaging with your members/subscribers.

Get selling subscriptions/memberships!

If you're an ambitious entrepreneur then selling memberships/subscriptions could be a great way to net you recurring revenue. And of course you can always combine selling memberships/subscriptions with other revenue streams as well – selling individual courses and products, for example – to create a multi-channel sales model.

Memberships/subscriptions are a growth market so you've a great chance of making money and growing your business. Happy selling! To find out more about selling digital magazines online see our dedicated page. Or:

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How Much Should I Discount My Digital Products?

2017-01-24T00:00:00Z

Giving your customers a discount on your products can be a great marketing tactic. You pull in new customers who think they are getting a great deal and who might be persuaded to buy other products as well. You get to shift more products, and you can take advantage of seasonal trends (Black Friday anyone?).

However, it can be hard to work out what discounting strategy will work best for you. We appreciate your pain. So we've looked at all the relevant SendOwl data since January 2015 to spot key trends in terms of: How much should I discount? and Should I offer a percent or fixed price discount?.

How much should I discount?

Our main finding is that there are three sweet spots for discounts: 20%, 33% and 50%. These discounting strategies resulted in the maximum number of orders.

As you can see, the general trend is for discounts to gradually attract more orders as they get closer to 20%, before falling back again.

The big outlier is the 50% category.

Half price? Heck, yes!

The 50% discount had the edge in terms of total number of orders, which may seem surprising. However, the customer sees this level of discount as a tremendous deal. For the seller, it's also not a bad deal, especially for digital products which have almost no extra cost per unit. Once you've made a digital product you're done. So all extra sales are pretty much pure profit.

Offering a big discount (like 50%) can work really well for sudden time-limited sales. For example, you send out a tweet and say: "All products 50% – but only until midnight tonight". A big discount works really well with the sense of urgency conveyed by the tight deadline.

One thing we found interesting is that further discounting seems to have limited returns. There's a little order spike at 75% discounted, but otherwise orders fall off as discounts approach the 99% mark.

If you discount too heavily your customers might begin to question the value of your product, so don't send the wrong signals. Digital products are intangible and rely on you communicating their value effectively to your customer (who can't hold your product in their hand, drive it or try it on). If you discount too hard you might drive quality customers away.

20% off. Why not?

Coming in a close second is the 20% discount category. This makes sense. 20% off has a nice ring to it. Customers can work out how much they are saving in real terms. It's a good discount without being incredibly generous.

To a certain extent, the same is true of the slightly less popular 33% category. Most customers can work out a third off without getting brain ache. It's a tempting discount without being wild. You still make a decent amount of profit.

Should I offer a percent or fixed price discount?

Our data shows that 61% of orders came from a % discount and only 39% from a fixed price discount.

So percent discounts seem to work the best for the majority of our sellers.

This broadly correlates with other research on pricing.

Wharton Marketing Professor Jonah Berger, says in a Business Insider article that savvy retailers will use "the rule of 100" to price their products.

The idea is that a $20 shirt is more appealing at 25 percent off versus $5 off, but a higher-priced item, say a $2,000 laptop, is more attractive marked down $500 versus 25 percent off.

This research builds on behavioral econ theories by psychologists such as Kahneman and Tversky.

How often should I discount?

We don't have any research on this at the moment. However, we suggest you track not only how many orders you get from a discount marketing campaign, but also, if you can, whether those buyers further engage with your company.

Customers who buy because of a discount may not value your product as much as customer who pays full price. So these discount-only buyers may be of less value to your company long-term.

Frequent sales may also deter your customers from paying full price, because their perception of your product's value decreases. Plus, they figure, "why buy now when I can probably buy at a 50% discount in a few months?""

So, test your discount marketing campaigns to make sure discounting works for your company.

Latest update on the EU VAT 2015 rules

2016-12-07T00:00:00Z

Image credit: Ninian Reid

Some good news at last about EU VAT. Keen to make the lives of business people easier – after having made them considerably harder in the first place – the European Commission have promised some improvements. There will be a yearly threshold and some simplifications as well. Wohoot!

Update: The EU has announced this will now go ahead in 2019

A yearly threshold of €10,000

If you sell less than €10,000 cross-border a year then you only have to follow your own country's VAT rules. This should reduce the number of obviously idiotic instances of sellers affected by the changes. For example, sellers paying €2.59 to the EU coffers after selling less than 20 digital products abroad. At a cost to their business running in to the hundreds.

So, if you are a solopreneur or small business then you may be off the hook. Even if you sell loads of digital products in your own country, you are exempt from the EU VAT rules if your foreign sales are below the threshold. You only need conform to your own country's VAT rules. Never before have they looked so friendly.

Simplifications for sales under €100,000 a year

If you sell more than €10,000 abroad but less than €100,000 then you'll benefit from some simplification of the rules. The need to provide two pieces of data to prove a customer's location has been stripped back to one. This doesn't quite deserve a 'wohoot' but it is faintly cheering.

No more weird letters from foreign tax authorities

No one really wants to receive a letter from a foreign tax office asking them to cough up some money. Under the most recent proposals: "The first point of contact will always be with the tax administration where the business is located and businesses will no longer be audited by each Member State where they have sales." Which is kind of funny as that's how it should have worked originally.

Great, can I open the champagne?

Always, but perhaps not in honour of EU VAT. These most recent changes are proposed but aren't law yet. They should be by 2018 according to the European Commission press release, but we'll have to see. For now, you're theoretically meant to abide by the existing rules.

What about Brexit? Can't I ignore all this stuff?

Nope. If you live in the UK, the US or anywhere outside the EU then you still have to follow the EU VAT regulations if you sell to customers in the EU. So even if the UK does Brexit, you'll still be in the same position, at least in terms of EU VAT.

Man, this year has been tough

True, but if the EU can change its mind about something then there's still hope. Onwards!

What Types Of Digital Products Can I Sell Online?

2016-12-06T00:00:00Z

If you stand on Oxford Street in London and look around you'll see a massive amount of goods and services for sale. Everything from coffee and nail polishing to kitchen gizmos and the latest hats with pompoms. And it's the same for digital products. There's an astonishing variety of products for sale. The only limitation really is your imagination. However, to give you a bit of inspiration, we've looked at our SendOwl database to see which digital products are most popular with our sellers.

Selling ebooks and other PDFs online is super popular

This didn't come as much of a surprise. Ebooks are a great way to communicate your knowledge to specific audiences being a modern take on a very old concept. There are tech solutions for authors who want help with producing a book while self-publishing is becoming increasingly respected and lucrative.

Indie-published ebooks are outpacing those published by the major players on Amazon. And that's not even allowing for all those ebooks sold direct through websites, social media and blogs using services like SendOwl.

You can be your own publisher and take your own share of the rewards, particularly if you sell direct. Stories likes those of self-published author Mark Dawson provide plenty of inspiration.

However, our sellers at SendOwl go far beyond writing ebooks about assassins, like Mark Dawson. They write about everything from bikini body workouts to Imperial Rome and mastering creativity. Sellers like Daniel Gold even write about how to write an ebook, which has a wonderful circular logic.

Need a hand getting started with your ebook?

We've written a few articles to help you create your first ebook, including: How to publish an ebook: everything you need to know in 23 easy steps and Top 10 mistakes mistakes made by ebook authors and how to avoid them.

Why stop at ebooks?

SendOwl sellers don't just sell ebooks as PDFs. They also sell magazines, fact sheets, research papers and vouchers. They help you get fit, feel happy, make money and bring up your children. For example, like Little Ones USA specialise in sleep training packages for exhausted parents. What price is a decent night's sleep? £55? I'm sold!

Sell as a one-off or a subscription

Some digital products lend themselves to a one off sale, and this is a tried and traditional way of selling. It doesn't mean you can't try and upsell customers so they buy another of your products before or after checkout. But essentially the content is complete in itself. After days, months or even years of graft you have waved goodbye and moved on to your next digital product.

However, a popular modern selling trend involves dripping content, products and services to customers over a period of time. Just think of Netflix, Spotify and Audible, where you pay regularly for access rather than buying individual movies and ebooks outright.

This sales model means you get recurring revenue, which is a very nice thing to have indeed. And it's much easier to sell to existing customers than new ones. Some products lend themselves particularly well to this kind of model. Ann Kullberg sells a subscription to her delightfully specialist coloured pencil magazine. If you'd like to find out more about selling magazines online with SendOwl have a look at this page.

Selling software is a great way to make money

Second favourite for SendOwl sellers is software. This may partly be because SendOwl is popular with software engineers and indie game designers who like that we're run by developers rather than marketers.

However, it also points to a very modern trend. For although ebooks might trace their origins to bits of calf skin scribbled on by monks many centuries ago, software and indie video games are thoroughly modern products that have sprung up with the invention of the virtual world. And as the digital world expands in scope, so too do the opportunities to sell new types of digital products.

However, both indie video game sellers and software sellers need a sophisticated digital delivery provider to meet their specific needs, including license keys, Steam license key integration, 2FA for added account security, free customer updates, and so on. To see how SendOwl handles these issues see our articles on How to sell software online and on selling indie games direct to your fans.

In this interview, Mark Morris of Introversion software, who have sold more than 2 million units, explains why he likes to sell direct as well as through indie games platform Steam:

Semplice, "the first fully responsive case study portfolio system based on WordPress", is a great example of how you can build your own business using existing ecosystems – in this case, WordPress.

Selling audio online is one to watch

Although not quite as popular as PDFs or software, audio files are a favourite with a sizeable number of our sellers who find a receptive audience around the globe. After all, people can listen to audio on the sofa or on public transport, squeezed under the armpit of a stranger. They don't need a stellar internet connection or their reading glasses. They just need a tiny device and a set of headphones.

SendOwl sellers include all kinds of musicians, from artists just starting out to household names like Radiohead and Kanye West. However, they also include sellers who have found a more niche global market. For example, The Drum Broker are a drum sample and sound design website that sells to producers.

If you're interested in selling music direct from your website read more here.

Don't forget pictures and video

Fewer SendOwl sellers work with video and pictures. YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr and so on means that to actually sell videos and pictures you need a pretty good product, while making quality videos (with good audio) or quality pictures requires plenty of time and skill. However, many of our sellers have that skill, and also a good eye for a receptive audience.

For example, Pro Audio Files sells tutorials on mixing, mastering and producing music.

Stuart McMillen sells downloads of his long-form comics inspired by social issues involving science, ecology, sustainability, psychology and economics.

A global niche can be a huge market for your digital products

Our most successful sellers are very good at creating professional, thoughtful products that target a niche market. However, that niche market is global. Which can make their business very healthy indeed! This was the experience of our SendOwl sellers Jason and Cinnamon who turnover $600,000 from dolls' clothing patterns. Jason advises:

There are back corners of the Internet where people are actively looking for solutions and no one is serving them. Those are the most interesting niches to discover.

We can't wait to see what other corners of the Internet our sellers conquer in the years ahead.

Interested in digital selling but need more information?

Not to worry, because we have created the perfect guide for you. How to sell digital products (the definitive guide 2017) covers all these topics:

Why sell digital products online?
What digital products can you sell online?
- Make money from something you're doing anyway or want to do
Do I need to sell through a third party marketplace like Amazon or iTunes?
- Sell both direct and through a marketplace
- Even major music studios are getting in on the act
- Advantages of selling direct
- Challenges of selling direct
- Can I really make more money selling products direct?
I'm going to create a digital product and sell direct: now what?
- Choose a payment gateway
What does a digital delivery company do?
- Providing a checkout
- Securely deliver your digital file
What price should I charge for my digital product?
- We do our best to answer the pricing question!
How do I market my product?
- Start early
- Ask for feedback
- Consider getting other people to sell your product for you
- Don't forget your pre-launch email sequence
- Don't forget no-spend marketing options
How can I improve my conversion rate and increase revenue?
What about theft, fraud and hacking?
I've got one of two products doing well – but how can I turn this into a business?
Checklist for selling digital products

Enjoy!

Do one-click upsells make you more money? (Yes!)

2016-12-03T00:00:00Z

We launched one-click pre-payment and post-checkout upsells and cross-sells in March 2015. Now, we've crunched our data to see how much extra revenue they've been bringing in for our sellers. In this post we'll look at our results, as well as at what one-click upsells and cross-sells are, why you might use them and when you might use them.

What are one-click upsells and cross-sells?

Upsells and cross-sells are a great way to get people to spend more money when they have already committed to a purchase. They are used all the time for physical goods: "do you want a drink with that" (cross-sell) or "the new version of that camera has wireless connectivity and a longer battery life: would you prefer to buy that?" (upsell).

Upsells and cross-sells, however, target people in slightly different ways. Upsells show people something more expensive and say: "why not have this great item instead?" These can be particularly effective if you have tiered pricing, and can persuade customers that by spending a little more they can get a product that is faster/smarter/more suited to their needs.

Cross-sells, in contrast, are about getting your customers to buy something in addition rather than something more expensive. Amazon are masters at cross-selling. Their 'frequently bought together' and 'customers who bought this item also bought' sections invite you to make additional, usually relevant, purchases. Amazon reports that as much as 35 percent of their revenue is from cross-selling.

This is how an upsell looks using SendOwl.

Why are one-click upsells and cross-sells so useful?

It's easy to focus on trying to get more customers to buy your product or service. After all, this is an important metric. However, it's expensive getting customers to come to your site, to stick around, to select buy now or add to cart, and then to follow through with their purchase.

So to make the most of your hard work, you want to make sure you maximise the lifetime value of that customer. This can mean either persuading them to spend more money or to buy from you more often. Or preferably both.

If you increase the lifetime value of your customers your business will grow in a satisfying way, even if your new customer acquisition rate is fairly modest. You want the lifetime value of your customers to look like this:

Upsells are an excellent way of persuading customers to spend more money, in a way that doesn't interfere with their initial purchase. This should be particularly true of post-checkout upsells, although interestingly these aren't noticeably favoured by our sellers (see below).

What seems to be more important than whether you offer a pre-checkout or post-checkout offer, is that you offer your customers something generally useful. So that they feel you are being thoughtful rather than annoying!

When would you use one-click upsells and cross-sells?

You want to encourage people to buy a related digital product as well as the one they have already selected – perhaps the second book in a series or a complementary video
You want to encourage people to choose a more expensive digital product when they have already got out their credit card and are prepared to spend money
You want to offer people the chance to buy a higher value product or an extra product at a discount, which means more money for you and a good deal for the customer
You want to offer extra goods but only once the buyer has entered their payment details and you know your initial sale is safe

Do one-click upsells and cross-sells really make you more money?

Yes. Our sellers made between 4% and 20% more revenue through one-click upsells and cross-sells. That's not a bad result considering how easy upsells are to set up (okay, maybe it takes 30 seconds to set up an upsell or cross-sell – hardly the labour of Hercules).

SendOwl seller Craig Clarke, founder of keto diet website Ruled.me and meal plan site Keto Academy, has found that his average order value has increased by about 20% after using upsells and cross-sells:

My results have been pretty great. I find that my average overall order value increased by about 20%. Over time this can add up to quite a lot of extra capital flowing into your business. I have upsells on all of my products. I've learned that if your customer is interested in your goods, and they're ready to pull out their credit card (or paypal account) to pay you for what you're offering - you might as well try to continue your sale for higher profit margins. This has resulted in just over 50% conversion rate in my upsells.

How do I make 20% extra rather than 4% extra?

Our research shows that power users of upsells are more likely to make 20% extra rather than 4%. In fact, we see a pretty straight line between the number of upsells by a seller and the % extra they make. So, success breeds success!

Be strategic and professional

A quick look at power users showed us some very professional websites like Colour Grading Central and Hands On as we grow. If people trust you and want to buy from you, they are more likely to consider giving you more money than they initially intended. So, to boost the revenue you get from upsells audit your site to check that your website is easy to use, professional and persuasive.

Craig also suggests that being strategic about testing and implementing upsells and cross-sells will pay dividends:

Make sure that you're not relying on only short term results to dictate a decision. If you're testing out certain upsells, make sure you have enough of a sample size to determine if it's working or not working.
Also, don't try to upsell products that aren't related to each other. I think one of the reasons that my upsells do so well is that they add value to what I'm already selling. If a potential customer is in a buying state of mind, then an upsell of something related and useful to them is usually a pretty easy choice.

Consider offering a discount

Consider offering discounts to encourage people to spend more. That way, customers think they are getting a good deal too. So, you could offer customers a 10% discount on an ebook bundle, which would still make you more money, but sounds more attractive to a customer than simply saying 'why not spend an extra $40?'.

Add photos or videos

Think about adding a photo or video to your cross-sell or upsell to make it more attractive to customers. After all, you are asking them to spend money on a product they probably don't know much about. So a photo or video will give them an injection of information when they need it.

Do cross-sells or upsells work better?

Well, we can tell you which is more popular with our sellers. And presumably our sellers favour the option that brings them the most revenue.

Sellers with fewer successful upsells tend to favour upsells and cross-sells fairly equally. However, our power upsell users tend to overwhelmingly favour cross-sells.

Do pre-checkout and post-payment upsells work better?

Pre-checkout upsells are when you show customers your option before they've entered their payment details. Post payment upsells are when you show customers an upsell or cross sell option after they've checked out.

Theoretically, the first option could add more friction to your sales process. You're showing customers an extra piece of content that diverts them from their stated intention – to buy something. The second option adds no friction, because customers have already bought a product. So that initial purchase is safe.

However, post-checkout upsells can struggle because a customer has already completed an action. They don't take your offer seriously. They feel that they are finished. In contrast, pre-checkout upsells get a customer before they have finished the payment process, so they may be more willing to act on your suggestion. The psychology is better, even if the risk of upsetting the initial sale is slightly higher.

We found with SendOwl that both smaller-scale upsell sellers and power sellers use both pre-checkout and post-checkout upsells equally. So customers are willing to spend more money than intended before they enter payment details as well as after.

This perhaps shows that so long as you get your upsell or cross-seller offer right – making it relevant, helpful and enticing – then you can persuade customers to part with more money at any point in the checkout process.

Concluding thoughts

Upsells and cross-sells are a great way to encourage your customers to spend more with very little effort involved. If you haven't already, why not see how upsells and cross-sells can benefit your company?

Pay What You Want Pricing

2016-12-01T00:00:00Z

What is Pay what you want pricing (PWYWP)?

Pay what you want pricing is when you give customers the choice of what to pay you for your product or service. Sometimes you set a minimum price for your product, whether that's £1 or £1,000, and give people the option of paying more.

In the example below the minimum price is $1 at checkout but people can of course choose to pay more.

Pay what you want pricing has been tested in a wide range of situations, from concerts to paying for video games online. However, does it work? Or do people just give you a tiny amount leaving you out of pocket and feeling deeply disgruntled?

We test out whether Pay what you want pricing boosts revenue

We run an ecommerce platform called SendOwl, which makes it easy for people to sell their digital products to people all over the world. And we have offered Pay what you want pricing as a feature since 2013. So, we've got a lot of data on whether PWYWP pricing works for our sellers - or not.

The results were fascinating.

Pay what you want is actually am effective marketing strategy

On average our sellers boosted their revenue by 232% when they used Pay what you want pricing for their digital products. This meant that customers were paying a lot more than the price they had to pay, meaning, rather encouragingly, that customers don't always pay as little as they can get away with!

Minimum prices don't have to be low

About two thirds of sellers chose a minimum price of under $10. A few sellers seemed to be aiming at volume sales so although their average price might hover around $5 (with a very low minimum price) they were selling thousands so their revenue looked very healthy.

However, even though some sellers specified a very low minimum price of $1 some saw a much higher average price, even up to $45.

About one third of sellers choose a higher minimum price. They tended to see a smaller % increase in revenue with Pay what you want pricing. However, this marketing strategy could still provide a decent bump in revenue.

Pay what you want pricing is a marketing strategy

Sellers who had the most success with Pay what you want pricing often seemed to be good marketers. This makes sense because Pay what you want pricing is really a marketing strategy rather than a pricing strategy. Customer need to understand why you have chosen this form of pricing before they'll support it. This needs to be obvious in your publicity material, not sprung on customers at the end of you checkout.

Based on our research and our own experiences, here are a few marketing approaches that work well with Pay what you want pricing:

You're super confident about your product's value

You're so confident that your product is worthwhile that you're prepared to wait for customers to give you what they want. You can price at $1 because you know that people will see the value and give you more. At least, this is the marketing message your content conveys to your customers. Be bold and very persuasive!

You care more about your customer getting your product

You price your product low (with an option to pay more) because you really care about people using your product. You want to change lives and reach as many people as possible who need you. This angle can inspire people to be generous as a reward for your less-capitalist-than-usual attitude. This angle could work well for lifestyle businesses with an emotive backstory, for example.

You're the underdog and you've worked really hard

If Nike or some other multinational asked if you wanted to pay more for their products you'd probably say no. Why would you? You don't intend for their top brass to get even more money than they are doing at the moment. However, if you are an underdog then you can inspire loyalty and affection – and generosity when it comes to paying more. Your customers think you deserve the money and they know you'll get it. They may even feel guilty giving you a smaller sum because they've read your blog and know how hard you've worked on your product!

You're doing good

If you're doing good, in some way, then Pay what you want pricing can make sense to your customers/supporters. You'd like $5 for example, to help fund a charity project, but if people like what you're doing and want to give you more then that would be lovely, thank you.

If you choose one of these marketing approaches (or similar) it's more likely that Pay what you want pricing will work for you. Your customers will be in the right mood to participate. And they don't mind a tiny bit of extra work at checkout, when it comes to choosing a price.

Other PWYWP case studies

Although we found that PWYWP can work well for our sellers, we were also interested in the experience of other people.

This case study by four statisticians about trying out PWYWP for their book The Data Science Handbook makes interesting reading.

This is their conclusion:

After we analyzed our results, to our surprise, we discovered strong statistical evidence that with a PWYW model for our book, we could significantly expand our readership (by 4x!) while earning at least as much revenue (and potentially even more) as either of the fixed-priced variants.

For a pricing strategy, look elsewhere

Be wary of using Pay what you want pricing because you can't decide on what price to charge for a product. This is unlikely to be effective because customers won't really understand why you're diverging from the norm of a fixed price and may respond less enthusiastically.

For help deciding on a price see our article 'How much should I charge for my digital product?'.

Want to try out Pay what you want pricing?

If you use SendOwl then we support Pay what you want pricing. This means you can experiment with Pay what you want pricing and see if it works for you. If it doesn't generate decent returns, turn it off and try another marketing technique like discounts or one-click upsells (also supported by SendOwl). Good luck!

Can you boost your income from digital products by nearly 400% on Black Friday?

2016-11-08T00:00:00Z

Does Black Friday lead to a sizeable boost in your digital products sales? Is it a global phenomenon or American-only? What sales techniques work? We decided to find out. After crunching data from 2015 for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales period we had our answers. And the results were resounding.

Boost your income by nearly 400%

Yep, that's our main finding. SendOwl sellers boosted their income by an average of 337% on Black Friday, meaning plenty of sellers experienced a sales spike of 400% and higher. Not bad for one day with a rather dramatic name.

Customers outside the US want to buy your products

Black Friday started out as an American phenomenon. It's the day after thanksgiving. People traditionally threw a sickie and did some shopping. Or went and hid in their bedroom with their laptop after a day of enforced socialising. But now Black Friday has crossed the Atlantic and is well and truly a transnational affair.

Although income from non-US sales was slightly lower on Black Friday there wasn't that much in it. The income spike was 294% on average for non-US sales instead of 337%. Still worth getting a bit of a marketing strategy in place for.

Customers buy digital products on Cyber Monday

Here's the same graph again. Now look at Cyber Monday which was originally about getting people to buy stuff online.

It shows that after a drop in income over the weekend, our sellers watched happily on Cyber Monday as their income increased on average by 200% (or 135% for non-US sales) from the previous week.

However, the sales spike on Black Friday remained the biggest for our SendOwl sellers. This shows, perhaps, that any attempt to get people to shop in physical shops on Friday and then online on Monday is doomed to failure. Which is unsurprising considering how intertwined digital is in people's lives these days.

Sellers use discounts on Black Friday

This is probably not earth shattering news, but it's always good to have confirmation. After all, pricing is a sensitive area and it's hard to know if you've got it right (see our data post on how to price your digital products for more guidance).

Discounts formed the cornerstone of SendOwl sellers' marketing strategy for the sales period, with a big spike in discounts on Black Friday. Considering we also see a big spike in earnings, it's probably fair to assume that the trade off between a reduced price and higher sales is more than worth it.

Sellers boosted their income with one-click upsells

This was cheering news for us, because we were one of the first digital delivery companies to offer one-click upsells on the basis that they'd help our sellers make more money with zero extra marketing spend.

As the graph shows, one-click upsell income peaked nicely on Black Friday and then had another spike on Cyber Monday, contributing to the overall income spike for SendOwl sellers over the sales period.

One-click upsells are effective because you reach customers at a point when they have already decided they like at least one of your products, and have decided to give you money. Psychologically people are in a good position to buy another related product, perhaps at a discount. And during a sales period people can get that wide eyed glint in their eye as well. I MUST BUY SOMETHING ELSE. So take advantage sellers!

As you can see, there also even seems to be a slight uptick in upsells before Black Friday. That's possibly because SendOwl sellers turned on one-click upsells (by selecting one box. Not hard) a day or so early and saw a few extra sales as a result.

Get set up for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales

Based on the fortunes of our SendOwl sellers in 2015, we'd highly recommend that you get involved with Black Friday and Cyber Monday if you sell digital products. Use discounts and one-click upsells. Sell to customers around the globe. Then sit back and watch your income from digital products, memberships and subscriptions income soar. Happy holidays!

All your reports are now available in one section

2016-10-19T00:00:00Z

Two weeks ago we launched our improved reporting section and renamed it Analytics. This was partly because the term Analytics captured the purpose of this new section: to provide you with analytics that will help you grow your business. However, this change was also necessary because we were planning a new Reporting section. Which is now live! Our new reporting section means you can get all the reports you need from one central hub.

What's the difference between reports and analytics?

Reports are complete sets of data for a specific area that you can download, mine for specific information, or use with third party services. Analytics allows you to view insights and trends that will help you grow your business.

For example a report of orders would include all orders, dates, amounts, buyer details etc, where as the analytics on orders provides insight into which days/times are the most popular.

Your favourite reports plus some new ones

The new reporting section means that you can download all your usual reports from one place: affiliates, orders, products, dunning subscriptions, EU VAT MOSS and country specific tax. However, we've also added a few extra reports to help you improve your company's performance.

Discount code reports

You can use this report to track usage of your discount codes, including discounts with multiple codes. This will help you see which discounts are working for you and which are underperforming.

Zero download orders/orders where people have downloaded

Use this report to see which of your customers have downloaded your products. See which customers are immediately engaging and which are slow off the mark.

Quick, easy and accessible reports

Simply choose which reports you want to see from the menu and access the information you need immediately.

The reports will either be downloaded in CSV format or shown onscreen depending on the report and the time it takes to generate.

Key reports are still available in the usual sections

For ease of use, you can access reports where they are relevant, for example, the products download link is still on the products page, as well as in the new reporting section.

Look out for new reports!

We'll be adding new reports to the Reporting section in the next few months. Keep an eye out for our monthly newsletter or follow us on twitter @SendOwlHQ for the latest news.

Happy Birthday to us!

2016-10-06T00:00:00Z

1. SendOwl was started with just $50

Desperate to find a decent delivery system, George created SendOwl, in his free time, with just $50. After a year, George chucked in his day job and went full time with SendOwl. SendOwl has never taken 'angel' or VC investment which means we can do what's best for you and for us.

2. SendOwl has sellers in 86 countries, selling to customers in 189 countries

SendOwl sellers have sold to customers in every country in the world except Eritrea, Micronesia, Guinea-Bissau, Palau, South Sudan, São Tomé and Príncipe and Tuvalu. So if you're reading this and live in one of those countries please get in touch! We've even processed 62 orders from North Korea including including embroidery patterns, pilates guides, music and diet ebooks. We're continually amazed by how the internet links us all together. And we're working to keep it that way.

3. SendOwl sellers have made over $180 million

That's a lot of money and it makes us feel very proud. We've tended to attract sellers who are serious about selling, from solo entrepreneurs with big ambitions to major music stars who want to reach their fans directly rather than go through iTunes. Go people!

4. SendOwl has help create 29 millionaires

Back in 2014 we interviewed Mark Morrison of Introversion Software. They'd starting out as a company of four students who liked gaming and were turning over upwards of $1.5 million. Introversion is now just one of 29 SendOwl sellers who have joined our Millionaires Club. With a few sellers over $900,000 we can't wait to welcome our 30th member.

5. 18 new feature released in the last year

As a company, we're strong on tech people and light on marketers, which means we focus on making SendOwl work better rather than on hype. As a result, we enjoy working on specific features that will help you sell more. The new Analytics section, drip products and gifting have all been favourites this year.

6. 43 pictures of SendOwl since 2010

There's something endearing about a blue owl that you can dress up. And we have. SendOwl has sported a cape, a crown and a trophy, among other items. We even had to slim SendOwl down in 2014 because he'd got a little on the porky side and we were worried he couldn't fly quickly enough!

A big thank you to all our sellers for helping us make this another great year.

Analytics should help you grow your business

2016-09-29T00:00:00Z

Analytics isn't just inert data that you look at and forget about. It's super-exciting information that holds the key to how you can grow your business – and what you might be doing wrong. Here at SendOwl we've know for a little while that we needed to make our analytics section even better. And now we have. You can now use our analytics section to discover everything from which country provides you with the highest income to how much you are making in different currencies and your average order value.

Optimise your selling techniques

At SendOwl we're pretty keen on giving you genuinely useful features that will help you sell more, including 1-click upsells, affiliate schemes, discount codes and gifting. With the new analytics section you can see how much extra revenue each of these features are generating. And which is your star performer. So you can do more of what works and less of what doesn't.

The headers in the screenshot below show all the different sections you can now analyse:

Get answers, quicker

Where do your most profitable customers live? What's your average order value? How much will you make next month from subscriptions? All this is now available. Simply choose what subject you want to investigate and dig in. We've even introduced a fancy new world view:

Breaking down your cashflow

Each of the sections in analytics now shows normal sales, subscription products and refunds rather than simply one graph as previously. So you know exactly what's happening in terms of your cashflow, day by day. We've also broken down all the data in tables below the graphs so you can see exactly which of your products/upsells/discounts/affiliates are under/over performing.

And all your favourite features from our last version

Our upgraded analytics section still includes baseline features such as the ability to see your sales over a selected time period, how many of your orders are started and completed, and income per product. So you can keep track of your fundamentals, as well as explore more advanced ideas.

It's available now on all accounts. Just head to the Analytics link in the sidebar to start exploring :)

Apple Pay

2016-09-12T00:00:00Z

Apple Pay is a new way for your customers to pay using their iPhone, iPad or Mac. With just a touch of a finger, they can quickly and securely make a purchase. It launches today and we already have full support in SendOwl.

What is Apple Pay

Apple Pay allows customers to turn their Apple devices into digital wallets. After entering their card details, customers can authorise payments using just their fingerprint. There's no need for them to enter contact details, delivery addresses or fiddle with card details every time they want to purchase. It has been available within iOS apps for the last year, but it's now being rolled out to the web.

This means that Apple Pay customers can complete checkouts in record time, which should mean a higher conversion rate for you. We've been playing with it here at SendOwl HQ and can assure you it makes checking out ridiculously simple. Expect to see its popularity grow quickly.

Plus your customers might feel just a tiny bit cool paying for products with the touch of a finger. Go on. Let them have some fun...

Availablity

Apple Pay for the web is available from today for customers with IOS 10. It will be available for those on the new Mac OS Sierra when that's released on 20th September 2016. In both cases you'll need to be using the Safari browser (Apple's limitation not ours) for the buyer to see the Apple Pay button. When they press this it's just a case of touching the pay dialog with their finger to approve the payment:

All your existing payment features such as EULAs, discounts, tax, upsells and so on will work automatically.

Keep up with new business trends

Be one of only a handful of independent retailers who can accept Apple Pay from the start. Simply turn on Apple Pay on your SendOwl account and you're all set. See our Apple Pay help article for the details.

API Upgrades

2016-07-27T00:00:00Z

Over the last month we've been rolling out a series of updates to the API. The aim has been twofold: 1) to make the API easier to use and 2) to make available to developers much more of what's available in the SendOwl control panel. Below is a summary of all the changes we've been making:

Overview/Getting started document

We've added a help document for developers to provide a high level overview all the integration points with SendOwl and how they interact. It's a great starting point for those new to creating a SendOwl integration, or for those wondering how to link the various integration points. The document can be read on our help site.

Multiple API keys and access levels

Previously accounts were limited to one API key/secret per account but we've expanded that allow multiple keys (as shown in the screenshot above). This allows you to use different keys for test/production or different integrations. It also offers better protection if a key ever gets compromised as you can just remove it and create another one without contacting support.

As part of this we also allowed the same access right to API keys as we do to users in our multiple-user accounts, so you can limit a given API key to just accessing orders for example.

sendowl.js upgrades

sendowl.js can now be used to programmatically add items to a cart and retrieve a cart count. Details can be found on the sendowl.js doc pages

We've also added a cart widget you can use on your site that will show how many items are active in the buyers cart. Full details on that on our help site

Web Hook for a payment

We've added a Web Hook for a payment. This is especially useful on subscriptions when you want to be notified of every payment. This will fire on every payment though so if you already have a new order web hook be sure to add some logic to detect that you'll receive two web hooks when a new order comes in (one for the order, one for the payment).

Products/Packages/Subscriptions API

We've added:

search end points to find a product
lookup by Shopify variant id
management of drip products
the ability to send out an update email when replacing a file

Details on the products API documentation pages

Orders API

We've released a new version (1.1) to support the new refunding method and added:

Direct download link information (not just a link to the download page)
A refund endpoint
A cancel subscription endpoint
The ability to grant/revoke order access
A reset downloads/download time endpoint
A resend order emails endpoint

Details on the orders API documentation pages

Licenses and Discounts API

We've added:

A refunded flag to the licenses check so it's quick to check if a license is against a refunded order or not
The ability to create licenses
The ability to manage discounts with multiple codes
Deletion of discounts

Other changes

And finally some other smaller changes:

Errors are now returned in the correct format (xml/json) instead of HTML
We've added more error catching code so you should get a relevant error message telling you what to correct in more situations
Documentation pages have been redesigned so they're easier to use and more in keeping with SendOwl branding

Tweaking how refunds work

2016-07-13T00:00:00Z

As part of some bigger underlying changes we've been making recently, we've tweaked how refunds work. Historically refunds would revoke access to the download page at the point of refunding. This made sense when we added that logic - if you refund a buyer then you don't want them downloading goods in the future. However there are a few cases where you may refund a portion of the order, or even the full amount, and still want to allow buyers download access. And as SendOwl has grown so has the number of customers effected by this. It may only be a small percentage but as a company grows a small percentage becomes a large absolute number.

So to tackle this we've introduced some new options. When you do a refund from within SendOwl you can now choose, via a checkbox on the refund page, whether to continue to allow access to the donwload page or not. This works great for cases when you're issuing the refund from within SendOwl but there are also cases where you don't do this. Specifically it's possible to issue refunds from inside PayPal and Shopify admin areas. In those cases we'll fallback on a new account option we've provided. This allows you to choose whether you want to revoke access on downloads by default or not. The new page, shown above, can be found by heading to the Settings section and then Refunds.

Due to this change there's a few implications for our API and Web Hook users:

Web Hooks - the new refund web hook will now fire on each refund, not once per order. This brings it in line with expected behaviour based on how other web hooks work (such as the new payment one)
API - we've released a new version (v1.1) of the orders endpoint to account for new refund functionality under the covers. You can see the details on the Orders API page. Those customers who remain on v1.0 of the API will not need to upgrade any app specific logic they've added as we've kept that version the same.

How Much Should I Charge For My Digital Product?

2016-06-30T00:00:00Z

How much should I charge for my digital product? We get asked this a lot, because pricing is tough. We've typically shied away from giving an answer to this question because it's equally hard - whatever generalisation we give won't be right for all sellers. However, in a moment of inspiration, we realised that we could extract some meaningful answers from our SendOwl dataset. After all, we've got thousands of SendOwl sellers getting pricing right, and at least 29 of them have made more than a million dollars! So, we dived into our database and analysed millions of orders to see what patterns we could spot. Here are our answers.

Single digital products are best priced at $100-$165

This was our main finding and we think you'll be encouraged by how high this price is. Read on to see how we got our answer.

What are the most popular price points?

We started out by asking: what is the most popular price points? This wouldn't immediately tell us the optimum for income, but it's a useful starting point.

As you can see there's a lot of products at the cheaper end of the spectrum, especially under $20. Popular price points also included: $30, $40, $50, $75, $100, $150, $200, $250+. There's actually a fair amount of data over $250 but it becomes more sparse so we decided to stop the analysis at that point. Don't let that you put you off charging a lot for your products though - we have customers selling a decent volume of products at $5000+ every month (and you don't need to sell many digital products at that price!).

Does digital file type matter?

We also produced graphs of the most popular prices by file type. Text, audio and images were similar but it was interesting to note that the big area on the very left of the graph was further to the right on the video graph. In other words - sellers are charging more for video. This makes sense: video can seem more valuable than text, audio or images.

How can I maximise my income?

Next we worked out the optimum price at which to sell a digital product. Generally speaking, as price increases sales decrease. But with that extra income from each sale what's the point at which it's no longer sensible to keep increasing prices? To find this we plotted the price of a product against its total sales:

The optimum average price is about $135. The curve isn't that steep and it seems anything in the $100-$165 range will yield around the same returns.

This number is much higher than you might initially expect. The more we looked into it though, the more it made sense. At this price the average seller is making around $20,000 from the one digital product. And I'd say that's fairly consistently what we see. An average product will make that much, a good one will make much more, and a poor one (or a poorly marketed one) less. If I'd had to put a number in the sand before we did this, based on all the sellers we've seen over the years, that's pretty much what I'd have gone for.

Sell at $135 if you have a good product, well marketed

When I looked at the products selling in the $100-$165 price range one thing stood out: they were all extremely professional products. The product quality and the marketing matched the price point. So, if you're going to charge this much for a product, make sure you can justify it with good marketing and a good website.

Here's some of our favourites we found from a random sample around that price point: Kayla Itsines (look at the sample product quality), Design Aglow (look at the website quality and product previews) and CEO Works (you may not like the design here but it's perfectly in keeping with its audience - and that's what you need to do).

Most sellers underestimate the price they can sell at

The final thing to notice on this graph is how even the optimum pricing line is compared to the most popular price points, which have big spikes and troughs (even allowing for the fact that successful sellers reuse the same price points across lots of products, skewing results).

In other words, most sellers are under estimating the price they can sell at.

Bundle products are best aimed at $35-$55 with bundles in the range 1.5-5x

Next we took a look at multiple price products. These are digital products that are often bundled in with extras and sold at a higher price: for example, interview notes/videos, member forum access or an hours consultancy are common extras.

We found that the main digital product is best priced at $35-$55 and that extras could bump the price up to 5 times as much (i.e. to around $175-$275) and still achieve maximum revenue. Read on.

What is the most popular ratio of main product to extras?

First, we looked at the most popular ratio of main product to extras. As an example, if the original digital product was $20, then a bundle of $40 would be a factor of 2x and a bundle of $50 would be a factor of 2.5x. Here's the graph of the most popular factors:

There are many more bundles in the 1.5-3x range than there is beyond that point. This makes sense, because it can be harder to sell higher price products. However, this doesn't tell us the optimum bundle price.

To find out the optimum bundle price, we looked at the bundle factor (ratio of main digital product to extras) versus sales volume to find the optimum bundle price point:

The graph show that you can go to 2.5x before income starts to drop off too much. By 5x the trend line is starting to go down faster and we think that's logical. If you factor up too much in the bundles you're either offering stuff people don't want or they become suspicious of the initial offer quality.

What is the optimum price for the main bundle product?

Next we looked at the initial price to offer the main product at. For that we took all the bundles and looked at sales volume of the original product:

As you can see the price point for the main bundle product peaks around $45 although the difference from $35-$55 is marginal. At this price point the product is bringing in around $15,000 which isn't too bad considering there's still the income from the bundles to add on. As with single product prices you need to make sure your marketing/website matches the price point you're wanting to sell at.

Does the ratio of main product and extras vary depending on initial product price?

Yes. We looked at how the bundle factor varied according to the starting price. To do this we used a scatter graph and then introduced an average line. That's shown below (without the scatter data for ease of viewing):

As you can see, the higher the main digital product price the lower the average scaling factor. Again, we wouldn't have expected anything else. The higher the initial price the harder it's going to be to convince buyers to go for 5x.

Conclusion

So that wraps up our analysis of the data and a weeks worth of hard number crunching on our part. What have we learnt from this? In conclusion:

Single priced products are best sold aimed at the $100-$165 price point
Bundle products are best aimed at $35-$55 with bundles in the range 1.5-5x
You can charge a lot more, or less, than this very successfully - you just have to back up that price point with your product/website/marketing quality
Working out simple rules of thumb from vast amounts of data takes much longer than expected (ok maybe this one just applies to us)

Find out more (and sign up for a 30 day free trial)

A quick word on our methodology

If you love your data, then you'll want to know that we do as well. Here goes.

In analysing the vast amount of data in our database we had to make a few restrictions, specifically:

we only analaysed products in US dollars
we excluded any items that were free
we excluded big sellers ($1 million+) as they skew results
we used a median average rather than a mean as it gave a better reflection of what the average seller was doing and wasn't altered as much by lots of high/low results
for any graph data we calculated, we voided any numbers with less than 10 data points
we only looked at products of our most popular types - text (pdf), audio (mp3), images (png & jpg) and videos (mp4)
we only took orders from the last 2 years

There's loads of other data but in using the most popular configuration we could get 80% of the results with 20% of the effort.

Pay for your account through your Shopify bill

2016-06-27T00:00:00Z

This update only applies if you're using SendOwl with Shopify.

A few years ago Shopify introduced the ability to pay for apps along with your monthly Shopify bill. Unforunately we couldn't offer this at that time due to technical restrictions at the Shopify end. However there's recently been some updates that now remove this hurdle. So I'm glad to say it's now possible to pay for your SendOwl account through your Shopify bill.

When paying through Shopify the SendOwl charge is added to your monthly Shopify bill and you pay for your Shopify account, along with all your apps, at the same time. If your card expires you only have to update it one place. And there's only one invoice to pass on to your accountant/accounts team. So it's a lot more convenient for those who want to deal with billing all in one lump.

There are some restrictions on those who can use this: firstly you have to be a Shopify customer (obviously), secondly you won't be able to use it if you use SendOwl in mixed mode or are a Plus customer (for rather complex reasons), and thirdly you won't be able to use it if you're on excess bandwidth charging.

Finally as the charge is made by Shopify in US dollars, if you're non-US based and are taking advantage of our GBP or EUR charging, you may find out you end up paying more in conversion costs/exchange fees. So it's worth considering this before moving across.

The move is entirely optional and you can set it up now by heading to Settings and then Billing on your SendOwl dashboard.

Upgraded discount codes

2016-05-16T00:00:00Z

Following on from our recent upgrade of drip functionality, we've just released an upgrade to discount codes. This comes with two main changes:

Firstly, we now support multiple codes per discount. This allows you, for example, to create a 20% discount and send a different code to each person. This is not only great for tracking (see which codes were used), but also security (each code can only be used once). A common use case we see is discounts on email lists/member forums/private facebook groups, where you don't want the discount code to be known to the wider world. With this new functionality even if a code is leaked, only one person will be able to use it.

Secondly, you are no longer limited to restricting discounts to one product. Previously you could limit a discount code to a product or bundle which was great for promotions where you didn't want a discount to be used more widely. But if you wanted to have a discount code that applied to several products then the only option was to create more discounts, each with a different code. We've now sorted this by expanding the discount code functionality to offer limiting to several products. Which means there's no more complex conversations with your customer explaining which code to use.

As part of this upgrade we've renamed "Discount Codes" to "Discounts" to better reflect what they do - given a discount can now have many codes. There'll also be an import via CSV available shortly that will allow you to import codes on mass via a CSV file.

Expanded drip functionality

2016-04-18T00:00:00Z

In July last year we released drip subscriptions allowing you to deliver a sequence of files over the lifetime of a subscription. This proved a massive hit with sellers as, amongst other things, the regular releases of content keeps the buyer hooked on your product. This of course means the buyer is less likely to cancel their subscription (and arguably more likely to recommend your product to somebody else).

Shopify sellers – you can easily use drip functionality for single payment products so please read on! The story is more complicated for subscriptions, however. You'll find more information here.

Thanks to overwhelming customer feedback I'm glad to say we've just rolled out an expansion of the drip functionality that extends it to normal (non-recurring payment) products. And for Shopify sellers this one is available for you too!

When you create a standard product there's a new option for a drip product type. It works exactly the same as a drip subscription where you line up the products and when you'd like them delivered (like the screenshot above). As with drip subscriptions we'll take care of delivering the files, and you can access the status of the item delivery on the order page at any time. In fact we've made everything the same as drip subscriptions to make it as easy as possible to manage.

And that's all there is to it. It's available now on all accounts - head to the Products section to get started.

Based on customer feedback, we've also extended the drip functionality more generally to allow bundles to be included (although it will skip any service/tangible items). This is available on both product and susbcription drips.

All The Emojis

2016-03-18T00:00:00Z

Emojis are all the rage and their popularity has now reached the mainstream. I know this because my Mum sent me a text with one in last week! Which means it's time to add full support to SendOwl.

From today, when your customers enter their gift message as: "Hey 😍, this ones for you X" or "Jonny, this one's for you to help you 🏊🏻🚴🏃 faster X" the message will now work as they expect. Although gift messages is the most common place we've seen people use emojis, there's been other areas too. Buyer names and answers to custom checkout fields are some of the most frequent places, but we've support in any field you, or your buyer, can edit in SendOwl. So go wild and enjoy!

Happy friday from the SendOwl team 💙

Custom Order Numbering

2016-03-09T00:00:00Z

Historically SendOwl orders have received a unique number allocated by us at the time of ordering. The downside of this is it can be a bit tricky for customers who want to change payment recipts over to invoices. Some countries have requirements for consecutive and sequential invoice numbers, and other sellers want to issue invoices outside of SendOwl so need a way to distinguish the SendOwl ones. We launched custom order numbers to address both these needs.

As the screenshot above shows configuration is really easy. Enter an optional prefix and a starting number and subsequent orders will increase from there. The prefix is really useful - most countries allow you to run several invoice number systems so if you sell consultancy time outside of SendOwl, as well as digital goods, you could for example number your consultancy invoice C0001, C0002, C0003 etc and your SendOwl ones DG100001, DG100002, DG100003 etc. You can also choose your start number so you pickup from an existing invoice system, comply with any local laws or just look like you've already sold 1 million copies of your product when you're just starting out!

All places you use the order number - reporting, emails, search, web hooks etc... will seamlessly pick up on your new order numbers so there's no other changes required.

Head to Settings and then Checkout to get started. Obviously in providing this we're not offering any legal advise on what's legal to do in your country so please check your local laws before setting this up.

Introducing Membership Integrations

2016-02-22T00:00:00Z

Membership software is an ultimate aim for a lot of online sellers and marketers. Get somebody involved in a community they can't live without and they'll be paying you money each month for years to come. As we've watched the explosion in this sector the last few years it's been amazing to see just how many niche sites have popped up, and how successful so many of these have become.

Until now the actual charging part of this has been a nightmare though. When you receive a new subscriber you have to manually copy their details across to your membership software which is not only a massive administrative burden, but also frustrates the buyer as they don't get immediate access ("it's 2016 I want everything immediately - where's my login dammit?"). There's also missed payments and taxes to think about, and that's before we even consider price changes or cancellations. In short it's an adminstrative nightmare. That is, until now.

Today I'm glad to announce SendOwl integration with S2Member, MemberMouse and WishList Member. Sell a membership via SendOwl and we'll automatically setup the buyer on your membership software. If they cancel they'll be automatically removed. This completely eliminates your memnbership adminstrative burden. We're leaving your free to do what you do best: run your community.

Of course I've talked mostly about paying for communities but the uses of the membership plugins are often much more diverse - forums for buyers of your product to discuss & network, backchannels for an event, one time fees for access to community generated information. The list goes on and on. The bottom line is if you want to add somebody to membership software whilst charging for it (or even charging for a related product), we've got you covered.

How easy is it to get setup on this? Very easy. Head to the Settings section and then the new Membership Services page. Choose the integration of your choice and enter your credentials. The page has the look and feel of the mailing list one so you should find it familiar and easy to use:

Once done you'll then get a new dropdown on the product page (under Advanced) that lets you choose the membership level for that item. When a buyer purchases that item they'll then automatically get added to your membership software. And it's as simple as that.

More information can be found in our help articles: S2 Member Pro, WishList Member and MemberMouse.

We've loads more exciting updates like this coming over the next few months so keep your eye on the blog for more.

Multi-user accounts are here

2016-01-25T00:00:00Z

Multi-user accounts are here! Much requested over the years since SendOwl first came into existence, I'm glad to announce that today we have released multi-user accounts. For those larger digital sellers this feature is a real game changer. You can give your assistant/intern/support team/anybody else access to your SendOwl account but with limited capabilities. It may be, for example, that you only want to allow access to the orders page but without access to your products or your reports (which detail how much you're making). All this, and more, is supported.

Adding users to your account is a breeze. Head to the Users section under Settings and click the Add User button. All you require is a name, email and some permission options:

Manager - can do everything you can do as an admin, except manage users
Products - can manage products
Orders - can manage orders, reset download links, change emails etc
Reporting - can access reporting on sales totals
Affiliates - can manage affiliates
Discount Codes - can manage discount codes
Upsells - can manage upsells

You can choose any combination of these to fine tune what a user can access. The whole UI reflects their permissions, so if they just have access to Orders for example things look a bit sparse (check out the sidebar!):

There's also intelligence built in so if you give access to discount codes but not reporting, then the discount code sales total won't be shown. Or if you give access to products but not affilaites, then the products edit screen won't allow editing of the affiliate commission rate. Here you can see the discount page for a user without the reporting permission:

And here's the same screenshot when we've upgrade the permissions to include reporting (note the Sales column is now present):

I won't go through the whole app listing how all the various options effect the UI, but needless to say when you add a new user it'll only show what you expect based on the permissions you select.

Those who have been contacting support the last few months will know that we've been working on under-the-cover changes to support this for a few months now. It has been a huge bit of work but we know how desperate our sellers have been for it. Thanks to the development team who have been working so hard on this.

Multi-user functionality is available to access now. Head to Settings and then Users to get started. You'll need to be on a Business ($39) plan or higher.

Just a quick note for Shopify users, make sure you have the "Applications" Configuration option unchecked under a users permissions in Shopify, or else can log into SendOwl under the admin user by clicking the SendOwl App.

Announcing Active Campaign integration

2016-01-07T00:00:00Z

At SendOwl we already have support for 10 different mailing list providers and many more through our Zapier integration. Today we've just released support for Active Campaign to add to that list.

Integration is just as easy as you'd expect with SendOwl, and works exactly the same as all the other mailing lists. Head to the Marketing section and then choose Mailings Lists in the subbar. From there enter your API keys and you're good to go:

Full setup details can be found in our Active Campaign help article.

We hope you enjoy this first update of the year and keep your eye on the blog for some exciting enhancements in the coming months.

Multi-user accounts coming soon!

2015-12-21T00:00:00Z

Update: this is now available. Please see our blog post here

We're always keen to help you sell more digital products and grow your business, whether you're an SME or a million dollar company. High on our 'to do' list in recent months has been multi-user accounts, so you can give different members of your team select access to your SendOwl account as well as their own usernames and passwords. We're actively working on this feature and will launch it early next year. Think of it as a little New Year's present from us.

Coming soon: multi-user accounts

It's not often we give a heads up what we're working on, but multi-user accounts have been much requested so here's a quick preview of what you can expect. We're expecting to launch this feature in January 2016.

Give different team members their own usernames and passwords

As soon as you stop being a one-person band, which happens pretty quickly as soon as you start using contractors, virtual assistants and employing people full time, you don't want to share your password and username. You want everyone to have their own login details for privacy and security reasons. Well, soon you can.

Give certain team members limited access only

Everyone in your team has a different job to do and not everyone needs to see the same content. In fact, some information in your SendOwl account might be quite sensitive, so you'd rather not share it with everyone. We get it, which is why we're making it possible for you to choose which team members have access to what content.

The countdown to multi-user accounts begins

The end is now in sight if you've been waiting for multi-user accounts! Just give us a bit more time to develop and test this feature (and maybe fit in Christmas and a New Year party as well), and we'll be back in touch early next year with some very good news.

You can now pay your monthly fees in Euros (EUR) or Pounds (GBP)

2015-12-14T00:00:00Z

For customers in Europe it's now possible to pay your monthly fee in Euros (€) or Pounds Sterling (£). We've had quite a few questions asking us whether this has been an option in the past. And it makes complete sense too. We're based in the UK so we pay a conversion fee from US dollars, and if you're not in the US, you end up paying a fee to convert to US dollars too. So the banks win from both sides. Now you can avoid that and pay us in your local currency.

To start paying in a new currency you'll need to re-enter you credit card. Once you've done this a new option will be available on the billing page that lets you flick between your local currency and US dollars. Our pricing remains in US dollars but when your bill day comes we'll exchange your fees into your chosen currency.

We use the daily rates from the EU Central Bank so there's no 2-3% spread that the banks typcially add either. This does means your fee in your local currency may vary a bit each month as exchange rates fluctuate but then it'll do that already, and you'll now be avoiding the exchange fee.

Here's what the new billing option looks like:

So just head to the currency line and click the link. It's really as simple as that.

Note: New accounts signing up from the UK or a Euro country, from today will now default to paying in their local currency. You can alter this back to USD if you prefer.

How to sell digital products online

2015-11-27T00:00:00Z

Selling digital products online is a great way to make money. You only need to create your product once but you can sell it as many times as you want. You don't have to worry about having stock levels, warehousing or delivery. And you can sell a huge range of products, from emagazine subscriptions to tiny house designs and ebooks. However, creating your digital product is only one step in the process. You also need to deliver your digital product, take payment, and actually get people to buy it. In this article, I'll offer some insider tips on how you can set up a successful digital products business.

Working out what digital products to sell

1. Share what you've learnt

You don't need to wait until you're the number one expert in the world on a certain subject to create and sell a digital product online. If you have been digging into a subject that bugs you and want to share what you've learnt with other people then you're in a great position to share your knowledge and make some money, whether you choose to sell an ebook, a fitness video or an emagazine.

Joel Runyon, founder of Impossible and the Ultimate Paleo Guide, turned his blog – read by just his mum – into a succesful business selling ebooks and videos. Read the full case study.

2. Grow your network early

Don't wait until you've finished creating your product to start marketing it. Even when you are still working on your book, or video game, or set of baby clothing patterns, start building your community. Share progress reports and ask questions. Get involved in discussions related to your product area. You don't even need to mention your product or service – just position yourself as someone who is interested and enthusiastic about an area connected to your product, and willing to talk about it in an accessible way.

While writing her ebook, Sarah Hinch posted exerts on a doggie Facebook group – and attracted a devoted audience even before the ebook was finished.

3. Don't wait for perfect before creating and selling your digital product

Perfection doesn’t take into consideration of the cost, time, or significance of something. It’s just an illusive, unreal, unattainable goal. It’s better to do good work really well. That way you’re contributing to people’s lives, instead of locked in your own head about whether your work measures up to an impossible standard. Michael Hyatt

If you wait for 'perfect' before selling your digital product online, you also run the risk of creating something very polished that nobody wants. In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries talks about the benefits of creating a minimum viable product (MVP) that you can test with buyers at an early stage.

4. Get early stage feedback

Get early stage feedback on your digital product. It's easy to assume that you know what customers need – but you could be wrong. For a start, you are too involved with your product (what do you mean it's not easy to use? You just select this and do that and then this and...). And sometimes people just surprise you. If you make yourself available and easy to contact you'll also create good will – and your customers will be more likely to hang on in there if you have any teething issues with your digital product.

Sorting out payment and delivery options

5. Make life easy for your customers

Make it as easy as possible for your customers to buy your digital product. This means making sure that your checkout process is mobile friendly (mobile now accounts for 50.3% of all ecommerce traffic), that you don't overwhelm people by asking for too much information at once, and that people have faith in the checkout process. Look for a checkout that is fully customisable if you want to convert the highest percentage of your customers.

Also, consider giving your customers a range of payment options. Some customer love PayPal; others hate it. For more advice read our article How to improve your conversion rate: Getting more people through the checkout.

SendOwl even allow our sellers to accept payment in Bitcoins

6. Make life easy for yourself

There's no point feeling smug about now having to worry about stock issues and warehousing, if you still feel like tearing your head out because of bugs, poor security, having to manually email customers files, and trying to customise a checkout process that can't be customised.

Digital delivery companies like SendOwl sort out payment processing, checkout and secure automated digital delivery for you. Which means that all you have to do is create your product and then get paid. We also make sure that SendOwl is as easy to use as possible, so you won't have to waste time on day-to-day management.

Get selling your digital product

Selling digital products online is a great way to make money. You only need to create your product once but you can sell it as many times as you want.

7. Sell through a sales description page (or social media)

If you don't have a website or blog, or want to give your customers a quick way to buy your product or service without dragging them to your website, then a sales description page might be your best choice. SendOwl offers this choice to all sellers. Sales description pages are a short, punchy way to show customers why they should buy from you, without distracting them with extra information. If you want to condense the sales funnel further, you can even send people direct to your checkout from social media. Although this type of 'social selling' works best if people already known your company, or with certain types of digital products that can be ‘impulse’ bought.

SendOwl's sales description page is a great way to sell your product or service without a website

8. Sell through your own blog or website

Of course, selling through your own blog or website is a great option because you can persuade new customers they want your product, even though they didn’t know this 5 minutes ago. This is a big advantage over selling through a marketplace, where you’re limited in terms of marketing copy and are unable to develop a relationship with your customers.

If you're selling digital products through your own website or blog, you can either use an Instant Buy button or Cart functionality. The former is better for one-off products, while the latter is best if you have a range of products and would like your customers to buy as many as possible.

This example from Avocado Social uses an Instant Buy option to sell a social media course plus extras.

9. Get other people to sell your digital products for you

You can also get people to sell your product for you if you set up an affiliate scheme. You can either choose a specialist affiliate service, or a digital delivery provider like SendOwl that has a built-in affiliate scheme so you don’t need additional software. If you don’t know much about affiliate selling read our article Boost your digital product sales with an affiliate scheme for some tips on getting started. Just make sure that you recruit quality affiliates otherwise you could devalue your brand.

10. Optimise your sales funnel

Just because you’re selling direct to your viewers, readers or fans doesn’t mean you have to settle for basic marketing functionality. Consider testing marketing options like upsells, pay-what-you-want pricing and discounting so you can maximise your revenue. We found that one-click upsells increased our seller's total revenue by between 4-20% – with no additional marketing spend.

Upsells are easy to set up and can increase your total revenue

Good luck with your digital products business!

Selling digital products online and can be an exciting and rewarding way to make money, whether you're aiming to make over a million or just to pay for your next holiday.

Good luck – and let us know how you get on.

5 Christmas marketing tips

2015-11-23T00:00:00Z

With the average spend per person for this holiday season anticipated to reach $805.65 according to a National Retail Foundation survey, now is a great time to promote your digital products as the best Christmas presents ever. After all, digital products do make great Christmas presents. And more people are buying them as presents for friends and family than ever before, appreciating that it's more important to buy loved ones something they want than it is to buy something 'traditional' with all the hassle of shipping costs and stock levels that goes with it. So here's 5 simple tips to persuade your customers that they should buy their loved ones something they actually want – from you.

1. Get your timing right

The obvious advantage that digital products have over physical products is that they are delivered immediately. This means that your customers can buy digital presents on 24th or even 25th December and still make all their friends and family happy.

In our blog post last year on Maximising your Christmas sales we looked at SendOwl data about when people bought digital products in December. And we saw a huge spike in the last few days before Christmas. We're all secret last minute shoppers. Wohoot!

So, although you'll want to let customers know about your fabulous digital products earlier in the month, make sure you do a last minute promotion of your products as well. You're bound to catch lots of people who have missed the 'last postage day before Christmas' and would rather go swimming with crocodiles than brave the high street in December.

2. Tell your customers about gifting

Many of your customers won't know that they can gift digital products to friends and family. They'll assume that they have to buy a product and then give it to their loved one via email or similar. Which is not very festive or particularly easy.

Instead, let them know that they can gift a digital product at checkout stage, meaning that their loved one gets an email saying that they have a present (wohoot!) and giving them a secure download through which they can access it.

They can also choose to send this gifting email on 25th December, to make sure there's no peeking before Christmas!

The giftee won't see how much the present cost (because Christmas is about what you buy instead of how much you spend). They will, however, see what generous soul just bought it for them. You can read more about gifting here

3. Show your customers the benefits of buying a digital product

Yes, it's true: buying people digital presents is not something you're going to read about in any of the classic Christmas stories.

However, just as gold, frankincense and myrrh has gone our of fashion, so too have the ghosts of Christmas presents past like aftershave (who wears this stuff?), toiletry sets (still mouldering in the cabinet from two years ago) and hardback books (to be placed in the loo and forgotten).

Today, in our era of smartphones and 4G, digital goods are making themselves popular as the gifts of choice for the modern man or woman.

And just in case your customers remain unconvinced you can always remind them that as well as buying their relatives stuff they might actually want, they can do so in the comfort of their own home, on Christmas Day, in about 2 minutes.

And you can perhaps also subtly remind them that December is actually a great time to treat themselves to a little – or not so little – digital product as well. As a reward for all the Christmas stress and strain. The NRF survey found that during the holiday period "55.8 percent [of respondents] will splurge on themselves and/or others for non-gift items, and will spend an average of $131.59, up from $126.37 last year".

4. Make your website look jolly (on all devices)

Some of your customers might simply not realise that your digital product would make the best Christmas present for their brother. Even though they know their brother would love it, that you sell it, and that they can afford it.

They simply haven't connected 'digital goods' and 'fabulous Christmas presents' in their minds. So help them.

You can do this in a few ways, but a Christmas makeover of your site could work well. So that your customers can see that your goods and Christmas have a strong and potentially very happy relationship.

Or make your own Christmas video targeted at social media. According to a 2014 MarketLive E-Tailing Group Consumer Shopping Survey, "30% of survey participants say they’ve made a purchase as a direct result of interactions on social media."

And according to a 2014 Google report:

Shopping-related content on YouTube, from unboxing videos to product reviews, is becoming an important part of the holiday research process and is trending up year over year.

Why not give some of those physical product videos a bit of competition?

Make sure that your website looks jolly on all devices as well. According to another 2015 Google report, 53% of those who shopped online during the holiday season last year used a smartphone or tablet.

5. Tell customers when you'll be around

Unlike physical shops, you can sell your digital product at any point day or night without you needing to be involved. SendOwl automates payment processing and delivery.

However, your customers will be reassured if you let them know when you'll be around over the Christmas period. They might have a question they want to ask about your product. Or they might just want to double check you're on hand in case their relative messes up their download attempts.

Good customer service – or even the promise of good customer service – can make the difference between a customer pressing the Buy Now button or thinking 'hum....maybe not'.

You know who gives amazing customer service? @SendOwlHQ I wish they could run my entire life, their customer service is so good.
— Magda Pecsenye (@AskMoxie) March 25, 2014

Merry Christmas!

Make your Christmas a merry one by following these five Christmas marketing tips to persuade your customers to buy digital. Not only will they make their friends and family happy by buying something they might actually want, but they'll make themselves happy in the process by getting rid of the usual stresses of Christmas present buying. It's a win win situation for everyone. Ho ho ho!

Gifting update

2015-11-20T00:00:00Z

Last month we launched gifting, which was much requested. This month, after listening to your feedback (thanks people!), we've improved gifting by adding the option for a delivery date. So, your customers can buy a digital product for their friend in November but arrange for the email with the download link to be sent on Christmas Day. Perfect for friends who can't be trusted not to peek at their Christmas presents in advance!

Choosing when to send the gifting email

If you choose to enable gifting, then your customers will be asked at checkout whether their purchase is a gift. If it is, then they'll be asked to provide some necessary details about their friend, as well as whether they would like to include a message.

They'll now also be asked when they would like their friend to receive that all important email telling them they've been gifted a product (wohoot!) and providing a download link so they can access it.

Your customers can ask for the email to be sent straight away, but if they want their friend or family member to receive the gift actually on their birthday or Christmas Day then that's easy as well.

We'll send out emails just after midnight on the day selected, no matter where in the world your customers' friends are based.

Your customers can buy a digital product for their friend in November but arrange for the email with the download link to be sent on Christmas Day.

Payment is still instantaneous

Even though your customers can choose to delay when the gifting email is sent out, payment for the digital product is taken straight away.

This way you receive payment immediately (always good for cash flow) and your customer isn't confused by money going out of their account months down the line when they've almost forgotten about their moment of generosity.

Gifting emails are now separate from order emails

We thought that it would work making gifting and order emails the same, but we'll put our hands up and say: it hasn't. So, the gifting email is now separate and should be much easier for you to work with.

We've deliberately kept the gifting email neutral so you can customise it yourself. You'll find the new template along with all the others:

We need to provide your checkout to support gifting

We need to provide your checkout to support gifting, so if you're a Shopify customer with a Shopify checkout then we can't help you on this one. You'll need to choose a Shopify free gifting app like Giftwizard instead.

We love partnering with Shopify, but there are certain SendOwl features that only work when we have control of your checkout.

Make the most of Black Friday and the holiday period

We've been super keen to get our new gifting feature ready for Black Friday and for Christmas – and we have. Phew! Thanks to everyone who commented on last month's gifting post suggesting improvements and also just to say thanks. Your feedback is always useful to us (and inspiring!).

For more information on gifting visit our help article and video.

SendOwl, Gumroad and bootstrapping

2015-11-06T00:00:00Z

We've had lots of emails in the last 24 hours asking us about the layoffs at Gumroad and whether this will affect us here at SendOwl. Gumroad are probably our biggest competitor and we've a lot of respect for the product they've created and particularly the team behind it. There's been some discussion over at Hacker News about the challenges now faced by Gumroad, its staff, and its customers, but I thought I'd write more fully about the situation here. This is a blog post I've actually been meaning to write for a long time. This is a post about the history of SendOwl, why we're bootstrapped and ultimately why we'll be unaffected by any situation like that at Gumroad.

The Venture Capital Machine

When I founded SendOwl just over five years ago I had a choice. I could go out and get Venture Capital money or I could start the company myself with $50 dollars in my back pocket (and retain full control). The VC route is alluring, but I knew that system well from previous companies I worked at and hadn't been impressed. Given how little capital you actually need to start a tech company, the choice was easy.

You see, a VC company is nearly always a temporary company. VCs want their money back and they want a good multiplier on it too. Consequently, they want you to grow fast or die. If that means using immoral business tactics, throwing out the founder or selling out and closing down the business it's not a problem.

Such a high risk, high pressure culture inevitably comes with a high failure rate. So it's hardly surprising that the whole VC system comes complete with its own PR spin machine. Funny how you get so many puff articles about accelerators and 'angels' and how you too can be the next big thing. Funny, too, how you rarely read about a failed VC company in the press, although maybe the odd article talks about 'a strategic restructuring'. Even the posterchild of tech reporting, TechCrunch, only publishes stories about VC-funded companies (try getting a mention when you launch your bootstrapped company). Of course if I was investing millions I'd probably want this kind of protection too.

The alternative: in it for the long term

In contrast, I wanted to build a business that would last, something that I could be proud of. I wanted it to be somewhere I wanted to work and was in control of, something that would be there for our customers for many years, who could grow with us. Getting millions of VC money, growing quickly and being gone in five years didn't interest me. I didn't want to work 80 hour weeks for five years and walk out with nothing. If we were going to fail, it was because I had complete control and we didn't make it. The founder of 37 signals, David Heinemeier Hansson, wrote an excellent article on the advantages of being independent recently: Reconsider

Starting out bootstrapping isn't sexy though. There were no glam offices, no press articles written by friends of our investors, and no high-powered board meetings with a range of organic free beer in the fridge. There was just me in a spare bedroom writing some code, with the belief that I could create something better than the existing solutions out there. Don't get me wrong, there's been some really hard times building SendOwl. There's been some 80 hour weeks, some times when I've wondered if its all been worth it. But these times pass quickly when you're doing what's right for your customers.

Our normal working week is 40 hours and our company working culture is exactly as I want it to be. I have a two hour lunch and go to the gym, other team members walk dogs, pickup children and head out cycling at various points in the day. I love it when employees comment in our team chat like the screenshot above. This is the kind of company I wanted to work at and this is exactly what sustainable looks like.

Focus on what's important

More important than my ability to fit in gym sessions, is that being bootstrapped has allowed us to focus on customer-oriented targets. We don't have to worry about burn rates, runways or monthly VC briefings. We focus on growth, great customer support and innovation. SendOwl has always had a reputation for providing great support and we're really proud of that, and it's something that I wanted from any company I created. But its driven so much more than that. By keeping close to our customers we know exactly what challenges they have. And as a result, we can provide solutions perfectly tailored to them.

You know who gives amazing customer service? @SendOwlHQ I wish they could run my entire life, their customer service is so good.
— Magda Pecsenye (@AskMoxie) March 25, 2014

This in turn has got us more customers and the cycle repeats. That's really our secret to success: as simple as that. Below is a graph of our customer lifetime which we review every month in our monthly team meeting. Once we get a customer we're really good at holding on to them and this for me is the ultimate question for any company: are we providing value to our customers, do they stick around and do they bring us new customers? If you're answering yes to these questions it's hard to go wrong.

Stuff like customer satisfaction doesn't come into a VC company, or rather it does, but only in a bigger conversation focused around exit values. Users are, at least for investors if not for company founders, represented by a series of statistics. They are user number 15,000 out of a target user base of 500,000. Their lifetime value might matter but only really in the sense of what it means for the company's financial projections. They cease to be people whose lives will be disrupted when a company closes, abruptly pivots or 'restructures'.

The future

Of course, I'm not blind to the advantages of the VC model. It makes growing quickly easier, it makes getting PR easier and it makes bringing in lots of staff early on an easy decision. But for me the benefits are outweighed by the downsides. Sure, we may not be growing at the same speed as Uber, but we're growing at a strong sustainable rate that's enabling us to plan for the future and to continue to provide great value to our customers.

Earlier this year, in our redesign of our main marketing pages, we decided to put our bootstrapped message on our front page because it's so integral to who we are. And it's attracting attention. We're getting more customers telling us they signed up because we’re independent. And more customers asking us about our business model, because they don’t want to be part of a VC-experiment that leaves them stranded in two years' time.

So there you have it: the story of SendOwl and why we're bootstrapped. We're 100% employee owned, we're profitable and we've got complete control of the company. We're heading where we, and our customers, want to go. We're here for you, our customers. We recently had our 5th birthday and, quite frankly, I can't wait to see where the next five years take us.

If you like what we're doing, come join us!

George Palmer, founder of SendOwl

We now support gifting

2015-10-22T00:00:00Z

Update: We now offer delivery on a chosen date as well. Details in this blog post

Why digital products make great gifts

You don't need to leave the house to buy them
You don't need to cross your fingers that your online order will arrive on time
You don't need to remember anyone's birthday until the actual day: you buy a product and it's available immediately
You can buy loads of cool stuff – goodbye socks and celebrity biographies!
You'll never again have that embarrassing moment when you come across your gift to a friend on ebay or in your friend's local charity shop
You get to save owls (and pandas if you must): digital products use fewer resources than physical products

Do people buy digital products for friends and family?

Yes! Although we can all conjure up the romantic image of a laughing father enthusiastically unwrapping birthday presents surrounded by his loving family, or of a Christmas with gifts scattered enticingly beneath a tree, the reality of modern-day celebrations can be rather different.

Adult birthdays can often include impersonal transfers of money, tired excuses for online goods that haven't arrived, and a lot of alcohol. Christmas involves people pretending they like their presents when secretly they just want to get back online, buy the latest video game or garden shed plan, and eat too much chocolate.

Digital products are helping to ease the stress of modern-day celebrations. And we have proof! The graph below shows that an increasing number of people buy digital products at Christmas time. We gathered this data last year from our own platform (you can read morein this blog post)

What your customers will see when they gift an order with SendOwl

Your customers will see this screen if they pay with a credit card:

And this screen if they pay with PayPal:

If they select 'yes' to gifting, they will be asked to enter the giftees email address and a name and message, although the message is optional.

The giftee will then immediately be sent an email informing them of their good fortune. We've deliberately kept this email neutral, so you can customise the copy and layout.

What you need to do to turn on gifting

Simply head to the Settings, then Checkout and choose the gifting checkbox. It's as simple as that.

Happy twenty-first century shopping!

It used to feel that the pinnacle of modern shopping was sitting in your pyjamas ordering stuff online. But then came the disappointment of orders delivered late or not at all, the realisation you've actually just bought a load of rubbish, the recriminations about the environment, and the difficulty in getting a refund or a replacement product.

With digital products, gift buying has just got a whole lot easier.

Want to find out more about gifting with SendOwl? Have a look at our help article and video.

Happy 5th Birthday to us!

2015-10-06T00:00:00Z

SendOwl is 5 today! He's said goodbye to his baby fluff, looked around for woodland new, and got down to the serious business of being the best digital delivery bird around. In this post we'll take a quick look at what SendOwl has been up to over the last year.

20 major new features

Wohoot! Our development team have been head down this year working very hard to bring you new features that will help you sell more digital products. Popular new features include: upsells, drip subscriptions, shipping, fraud/regional filtering and video streaming.

16 new owl pictures

The SendOwl has really taken flight this year, getting involved in everything from conversion optimisation to mobile ux and shipping. Plus he's found time to open some champagne to celebrate the launch of our Million Dollar club for sellers who have made over $1,000,000 through SendOwl.

You won't catch us napping at SendOwl [image credit]

1 x EU decision that has prematurely aged us

They really know how to be party poopers over at the EU HQ. January brought in the new EU VAT rules and it was a good job we'd prepared for them and have been keeping on top of them ever since.

10 new SendOwl pricing plans

As we've grown, we've found that more of you need specialist plans while some high-volume Shopify and non-Shopify sellers would like extra features. No fear! This last year SendOwl has launched self-hosting and subscriptions pricing plans, as well as Shopify Plus and Plus pricing plans.

28 new blog posts

It's always been important to us that SendOwl is friendly, useful and entertaining and our blog is as the heart of what we do. Keep in touch via @SendOwl HQ for articles about nifty new features, better ways to sell online, and for updates on the digital delivery industry.

1 new marketing page design

As SendOwl has taken flight, so too have our marketing pages. Our new homepage, features page and demo page show why SendOwl is perched top of the tree when it comes to digital delivery.

Playing with ideas for the headline and sub-head

18 new help videos

In the last 3 months, our customer support lead Paul has produced 18 help videos on everything from managing subscriptions to adding a redirect to your product. You'll find them when looking at help articles or by heading over to our YouTube page for the full list. And we've only just started - there's plenty more to come.

1 comparison to a fine steakhouse

Thank you @proaudio files. The SendOwl would take a steak over a Big Mac any day!

Thank you

We'd like to thank you, our loyal customers, for helping us have such a terrific year. Each time you tweet about us, mention us on a Facebook group, or drop our name into a conversation at the pub or at work, then you help us to fly that bit higher and faster. Without you, we'd still be a sad little owlet clinging to a tree rather than the blue dynamo we are today. Here's to another great year!

We've upgraded our affiliate scheme

2015-09-25T00:00:00Z

SendOwl's affiliate scheme has been hugely popular since its launch in 2011. After all, the idea of getting someone else to sell your products for you is pretty tempting. Now, fast-forward a few years, and we've give the affiliate scheme a much-needed update. It's now easier than ever to recruit and manage affiliates through SendOwl.

SendOwl's affiliate scheme is bundled in with your ecommerce system so you don't need two separate systems.

New affiliate features

Track number of clicks

Previously we tracked orders started and completed. Now we track the number of clicks that an affiliate sends you as well, so you can see which affiliates are sending you the most people. You can use this metric to identify affiliates that are converting highly or very badly.

Note: as we've only just started tracking clicks, we've added one click for each existing affiliate order you've taken to date (or it would be a bit weird having 3 clicks for 132 orders).

Set up accounts for new affiliates

We got a lot of feedback suggesting it's often easier for you just to set up an account for a new affiliate rather than asking them to do this themselves. This makes it easy for you to recruit affiliates that are not very technically saavy, or just too busy to setup a new account themselves.

To set up an account for an affiliate, head to the Marketing section and Affiliates page and click the "Add an affiliate" button. They're sent an email with a temporary password, and once this is changed on first login, they can join your program.

Customise your joining email

When an affiliate joins your scheme you can now configure the email they get sent, just like all the other emails we send out on your behalf. Head to Settings and then Email Templates to make whatever changes work for you.

Add a description to your links so affiliates know what they are

Adding a description to your links is a quick way for you to explain to affiliates what those links refer to, particularly if they're managing a lot of links. This is optional so there's no need to worry about changing existing links (unless you want to).

Here's what it looks like when you add a description:

This is what an affiliate sees:

Two affiliates refer the same customer: choose who you reward

Under our old system, if one affiliate referred a customer only for another affiliate to refer the same customer a bit later (before the cookie expired) then credit went to the second affiliate. Now you can choose who to reward.

Small updates

There's also been another 10 or so smaller updates made to the affiliate program that you may notice if you're a heavy user.

Basic affiliate features

If you're not already using an affiliate scheme, now is a great time to get started. Simply head to Settings and then Affiliates to get setup. The SendOwl scheme has a host of benefits:

You can choose commission rates on a per product rate and give special rates to certain affiliates
You can ban affiliates who abuse your trust
All the reporting is automated – you just need to pay at the end of the month
We'll provide all the links, tracking, reporting and so on so you have as little work to do as possible

For more information about the scheme browse our setting up your own affiliate program help article.

An introduction to affiliate selling

If you're new to affiliate selling or to Sendowl, have a look at our blog post Boost your digital product sales with an affiliate scheme for tips on what an affiliate scheme is and how it works – plus an interview with SendOwl seller and affiliate scheme owner Daniel Gold.

Are you a high-volume digital seller? If so, check out our new Plus Plans.

2015-08-27T00:00:00Z

As a result of many requests from our high volume sellers, we've launched a range of SendOwl Plus plans that specifically cater for larger, growing companies. Extra features include enhanced fraud filtering integrations, telephone support, multi-store management, account managers and more. We can also offer reporting for music chart sales. We love all our customers equally though, so we'll continue to develop great features for everybody!

As a result of many requests from our high volume sellers, we've launched a range of SendOwl Plus plans that specifically cater for larger, growing companies.

Enterprise software at an entry level price

We're a small company with more than seven years' experience helping our sellers grow their businesses. Million dollar companies, start ups, and growing companies all rely on us to make their digital sales as efficient and hassle free as possible.

However, up until now we've helped our high-volume sellers on a company-by-company basis. Now, we've standardised how we support medium size and larger companies, to make your life (and ours, if we're being honest) easier.

A preview of our SendOwl Plus Plans for high-volume digital sellers

Here's a glimpse into what you get with the Plus plans:

Priority and telephone support. You can't afford problems – we understand. We'll provide you with a dedicated account manager to help you grow your business, as well as priority support so any problems are resolved super fast.
SLA backing for larger Plus plans
As well as our standard security features (PDF stamping, limited download attempts, video streaming) we make it easy for you to integrate with dedicated fraud filtering services
Reporting for music chart sales
Get 6 monthly growth hacking sessions with digital entrepreneur and SendOwl founder George Palmer with larger plus plans

And if you're not already a SendOwl customer:

Concierge onboarding. Choosing a digital product platform is an important decision – and sometimes a disruptive one. With SendOwl Plus we'll make it an easy and safe choice. Our dedicated support team will make sure you're up and running as quickly and smoothly as possible.

Plus plans for peace of mind

Okay, this is a cheesy headline! However, what a lot of our larger sellers tell us is that they want a digital platform that is reliable, very secure, that scales without any fuss, that doesn't take a big % cut of their sales as soon as they make more money, that has a predictable pricing model so they can future plan, and that will sort out any issue for them really quickly.

We've taken all this feedback to heart in launching our Plus plans.

For more information about SendOwl Plus plans visit our dedicated Plus plans page or email support@sendowl.com

We've overhauled our homepage and other key marketing pages

2015-08-26T00:00:00Z

We recently launched our newly designed homepage, features page and demo page. We last overhauled these key marketing pages back in 2013. In this post we'll talk about how we designed these new pages and why we bothered.

Why did we redesign our key marketing pages?

Our last redesign was back in 2013 and saw a 102% bump in conversions. Our key marketing pages were still performing well as of July 2015 with our conversion rate and bounce rate performing extremely well.

However, we thought we could do better. Why? For a start, there'd been a few small warning bells. We were consistently getting quite a few basic questions about whether we did this or that come into support. Some people will always want to email us to check we're real. Fair enough. However, it looked like many would-be customers were emailing us because although they kind of liked the site, they weren't getting enough answers from it. This needed to change because it was costing us money, potentially losing us customers, and not doing much for our claim to be user friendly.

We began to realise that although as a company we've been moving very fast since 2013 – rolling out more than 20 major new features in the last year alone – our key marketing pages were failing to keep up

We also began to realise that although as a company we've been moving very fast since 2013 – rolling out more than 20 major new features in the last year alone – our key marketing pages were failing to keep up. Indicative, was our main image of The Send Owl, stationary and inert on a computer screen. We were fast moving. Dynamic. Taking flight! We needed the Send Owl to represent that too.

Stationary SendOwl: it was time for him to take flight!

Last but not least, we were no longer sure that our key marketing pages accurately represented our brand. Words like 'awesome' didn't fit with our image as London-based and straightforward. Sentences like: 'Discover how SendOwl is going to make you happy' weren't focused enough on what our sellers most cared about, that is, growing their business and selling more digital products. We also wanted to be much better at showing what we did using statistics, videos and examples, rather than telling (i.e. boasting) and hoping that people believed us!

Think first; design later

Having agreed that we were going to overhaul three key pages: the homepage, features page and demo page, founder George and content person Hannah had a bit of a brain storm over a nice cup of tea (or at least Hannah drank tea: George probably drank a post-exercise recovery shake).

This is probably the most important step in the entire process, because unless you think deeply about your key business and user goals, and what you need to communicate, your new design will look good but still perform badly.

Unless you think deeply about your key business and user goals, and what you need to communicate, your new design will look good but still perform badly

We discussed at a high level what SendOwl did, what it did better than competitors, and why customers should care. A few ideas were:

It can be tricky explaining what SendOwl actually does. Yes, we help people sell more digital products online, but how do we do this? To be explicit: we integrate with payment gateways, provide a checkout, and automatically deliver digital files, among other things. Can we explain who we are and what we do better?
Why should our customers care about us? Well, that depends on who they are and what they need. Our fixed pricing model means that we particularly appeal to growing companies who don't want to be penalised for their success by a % cut model. And to customers that care about high-converting design, customer support, innovation and personality. How can we best appeal to our potential customers?
We strive to be reliable, straightforward and friendly. How can we communicate these qualities to potential customers across all our content and design?

Two ways to sketch an owl

Content person Hannah started by sketching out some designs. By hand. In a notepad. These may not have shown the Send Owl at his best (Hannah can't draw owls), but left her free to experiment quickly and cheaply. In a world of amazing technology, the pen and paper still runs supreme in our opinion. This is Hannah's first sketch of the homepage:

The first draft of SendOwl's new homepage: good job we used a designer at a later stage!

The homepage

We then sketched out some rough content ideas and also started to experiment with copy. The thought process went something like this:

The SendOwl could fly. We're dynamic people here. Hey, let's give him a cape!
We're the only ecommerce platform that cares about conversion rates, ease of use and owls. And that's true! Let's test that as a subhead.
How can we explain what we actually do? Can't do that with copy. It would take too many words. So, how about some kind of diagram that shows what we do and what customers do (i.e. create products then watch the money roll in because everything else is automated)?
We need to show that we keep things simple for our sellers and buyers. How about two videos that show it actually only takes 20 seconds to upload a digital product and for a customer to buy a digital product?
Customer service: okay, we get a lot of compliments. Let's stick a few down here. It's good social proof.
Lots of tech companies go down the pan because of the 'grow fast or die' attitude forced on them by investors. We're privately owned so why don't we show that this is a good thing? That it makes us able to think about the long term rather than about growing 50000% in the next week.
Who doesn't love London? And British humour. And an owl in a crown? Time to get in touch with our roots.

Lots of tech companies go down the pan because of the 'grow fast or die' attitude forced on them by investors. We're privately owned so why don't we show that this is a good thing?

Playing with ideas for the headline and sub-head

The features page

We then took these ideas and created them in more detail using wireframing software Balsamiq. Here's a draft of the top section of the features page:

We used wireframing software to further develop our ideas

As you can see, we're already using 'real' copy at this stage. After all, if we couldn't answer customer questions about what we do and how we can help them in about 5 seconds flat, no amount of lovely design would save us. So useful, usable, enjoyable content was always going to be a priority.

Our ideas for this page were along the lines of:

Wow! We've launched a lot of new features. Let's get them down.
Let's put in some stats to show why our responsive checkout is a good plan, for example. Stats are useful. Puffery is not.
Let's not lose site of benefits. Customers care about how a feature will make their business better. So, let's say 'customisations that will increase conversions' to give customers an idea of why customisations are a good idea. We can then go into more detail about that set of features.

A section from our new features page: there's plenty more sections

Let's round up with the privately owned message. Any old ecommerce platform can have some features. But if you sign up with us, you get a company that cares about customers and pioneers its own path.
Hum... we need two calls to action. One to the demo page so people can see how SendOwl actually works (show don't tell – that's definitely our anthem for this redesign!). But we also need another call to action for people who want to know if we do something specific. In that case, they need our much improved help section. Let's send them there rather than hiding the help section link down in the footer.

The demo page

Previously, our demo section was at the bottom of the homepage where it was easily missed and a bit confusing. And it shouldn't have been. We could see in some of our support emails that people wanted to see our credit card checkout in action, for example. And we couldn't just use copy and images to describe these features. That would be clunky and unpersuasive. We needed something interactive.

However, we wanted all of our marketing pages to be distinctly by SendOwl. A boring demo page was never going to make the cut. We decided to try and make the page more engaging (and useful) by penning some very short stories. So, to demo the license key you're give this use case:

Prask is the founder of a successful indie gaming company, who hit the big time last year with their game 'The stealth bomber of the skies – Grey Owl goes nuclear'. They sell through Steam as well as through their own website. Right from the beginning they needed an ecommerce platform that could handle license keys (and Steam license keys). That's why they chose SendOwl.

This storytelling approach might look frivolous, but storytelling is an extremely effective marketing tool, as Psychology Today demonstrates:

Functional MRI neuro-imagery shows that, when evaluating brands, consumers primarily use emotions (personal feelings and experiences) rather than information (brand attributes, features and facts)

Straplines and subheads

Wow, these are difficult. You need these sentences to work overtime: to show what you do, how a customer will benefit, and they should also support your brand.

We made a short list and decided to a/b test them. After all, what you like (you as the boss or you as the copywriter) may not be what your customers like. You know those people: the ones that hand over their hard-earned cash and make your entire business possible.

So, a/b testing lets you see what your customers prefer. Even if you do secretly have your fingers crossed that they prefer your favourite strapline...

We're a/b testing straplines and subheads to see which increase conversion

Over to you, magical designer

By this point, we'd got wireframes that showed roughly how content should be prioritised (the layout of pages would change depending on someone's device size) and included copy that we were already about 85% happy with.

It was now time to collaborate with a designer on icons, images and general layout design. We said stuff like: 'we'd like SendOwl in a cape' or 'we need an icon to do with EU VAT rules' and our designer got back to us with something that looked just right. Magic! Particularly when you can't imagine it yourself. Well, we could imagine an EU bureaucrat slipping on a banana skin, but figured that probably wasn't appropriate.

Some icons from our new marketing pages

Of course, the more information about your company you can give a designer the easier it is for them to do a great job. They aren't mind readers so you need to show them what matters to your company.

We also asked our great support guy and video maker Paul to make 2 x 20 second videos to show how easy it is to upload and sell products using SendOwl. He used a stop watch. That shows we're serious about making SendOwl really easy to use.

We need to show that we keep things simple for our sellers and buyers. How about two videos that show it actually only takes 20 seconds to upload a digital product and for a customer to buy a digital product?

Our new videos for the homepage: why not watch them?

Concluding thoughts

We're waiting to see if the new marketing pages improve our key metrics. And that includes our customer support requests. So far so good, but it's early days and more tweaks will probably be needed. After all, our website isn't carved in stone. It's a living space that needs to be regularly updated and maintained as our business evolves.

We now offer drip subscriptions

2015-07-30T00:00:00Z

We now offer drip subscriptions. This means you can automatically deliver content to your customers over a set time period, rather than giving them access all at once. Perfect if you're selling a magazine series, a course that requires thinking time, or a number of videos that need recovery time factored in.

Attention Shopify sellers! You can easily use drip functionality for single payment products. The story is more complicated for subscriptions, however. You'll find more information here.

Our annual survey suggested that a lot of you are using subscriptions, often in ways that we didn't quite expect. Although we're glad this feature is so popular, we decided we needed to up our game if we were to keep you all happy.

So, here goes. Welcome to drip subscriptions!

Dripping rather than dumping content

Sometimes you want to give subscribers instant access to all your content. We already make this pretty straightforward.

Now, if you want to give customers access to specific content over a set time period then you can do this too. For example, you can give customers access to part 1 of your series as soon as they buy your product, then arrange delivery of parts 2-5 every week for the next 4 weeks.

Dripping content over a few weeks or months also makes it less likely customers will sign up for a short period, download all content, and then cancel their subscription.

A customer will be automatically emailed with a link to each download so you don't need to do anything extra. Apart from perhaps create another part in the series. Or another series.

Set up and management is easy

When you add a new subscription via the product tab, you'll see a subscription action called 'Drip'. You'll then be given the option of adding as many new drip items as you like, specifying after how many days or weeks they should be delivered and what item you want delivered.

To make sure you can keep track of who gets what, you'll also see a new section on each orders report. This shows what should be delivered as well as what has already been sent.

This really is as simple as that to setup and manage - just configure and forget. But then you wouldn't expect anything less with SendOwl would you?

Plus we've added some extra subscription options

As part of our much requested subscriptions overhaul, we've also added some extra options. If you're using the 'magazine' style subscriptions, where buyers get access to all files added to your account after they subscribe, you can now limit access to a subset of your files (via a bundle). You can also give your new customers access to the last created file when they start the subscription.

For more information about setting up drip subscriptions see our help article

Learn more about selling digital magazines online

2015 EU VAT rules: the six month roundup

2015-07-16T00:00:00Z

It's the 6 month anniversary of the new EU VAT rules. So, should we throw a party? Write a card to the EU expressing our deep sense of gratitude? Possibly not. However, what we have decided to do is write a quick summary of the EU VAT debate over the last six months. Information has often been so piecemeal and reactive that it's been hard to follow. So, we've brought together some of the highlights (or should that be lowlights?) of the last six months.

What has changed?

The new rules

It's worth recapping that despite all the protests and mildly apologetic speeches by political figures, the main legislation itself is still in place.

So, while previously digital goods were taxed at the seller's location, now digital goods are taxed at the buyer's location. If you were based in the UK in 2014 you'd pay VAT at 20%, or no VAT if your revenue was under £81,000 (Britain has quite a high VAT threshold).

Now you need to know where your customer is located and then charge VAT at the appropriate rate, ranging from 27% in Hungary to 17% in Luxemberg. And these VAT rates are subject to change – as well as to an ongoing debate as to whether it's legal for countries to charge a reduced VAT rate for ebooks, as they do for print books.

You also have to store buyer location data for ten years.

It's the 6 month anniversary of the new EU VAT rules. So, should we throw a party? Write a card to the EU expressing our deep sense of gratitude? Possibly not.

The broader impact

It seems that EU bureaucrats and national politicians grossly underestimated the number of small businesses that would be caught by this legislation, meaning the impact has been much greater than expected. Enterprise Nation suggests that HMRC underestimated the impact by 340,000.

Even EU Vice President Andrus Ansip "agreed that the new EU Digital VAT rules are posing a huge problem for SMEs and micro businesses." [EU VAT Action]. And to get a politician to admit to a problem should give you some idea of the pressure he was put under by disgruntled entrepreneurs. It's not something they do willingly.

The main point of confusion seemed to be that politicians didn't realise how many small businesses sold direct to customers rather than using a third party reseller like Amazon. If they had only talked to small sellers occasionally rather than to huge corporations like Amazon they wouldn't have made such a mistake.

As a result of the new EU VAT rules, some EU businesses have closed, others have blocked sales to European customers (we decided to offer EU blocking because of demand), while others have decided to sell their goods through a reseller that handles VAT – despite the limitations and ironies of this approach.

Hundreds of thousands of EU businesses have also ignored the new rules, either because they don't know about them, or because they don't think that individual countries are going to pursue them through the courts for the sake of £4.50.

Who has to comply with the legislation?

It's worth recapping that despite all the protests and mildly apologetic speeches by political figures, the main legislation itself is still in place.

Everyone selling digital products to customers in the EU. If you are selling to businesses in the EU – defined as customers with a VAT number – you should already be using the EU reverse charge mechanism.

So, if you sell one digital comic to one buyer in France you need to register for VAT. To make your life easier (thanks EU!) they've come up with the VAT MOSS scheme which allows you to register all your EU customer transactions in one place and pay what you owe in a single lump every three months, rather than having to deal with every country separately.

You also need to comply with the regulations if you are based outside the EU but sell to EU customers. This has been rather confusing, but HMRC (working on the better late than never principle) have tried to make things easier:

They now run two VAT MOSS schemes:

Union VAT MOSS scheme for businesses established in the EU including the UK
Non-Union VAT MOSS scheme for businesses based outside the EU (for example, the USA, Canada, China)

So, if you're a business registered in China but selling digital products to the EU, you can register for the non-union VAT MOSS scheme through HMRC.

We've heard about some teething trouble with VAT MOSS. Croatia went missing for example:

However, many of our sellers have told us that the process has been fairly straightforward (although we do provide them with all the EU sales data they need – it's tougher if you're doing this yourself).

We wrote a helpful guide to filling in your VAT MOSS return if you want to see what you need to do.

Are any digital products exempt?

There's been quite a lot of debate about this because the explanation of what constitutes a digital service is open to at least a degree of interpretation.

Basically though, if you sell digital products like images, audio downloads, ebooks, garden shed plans and crochet patterns in an automated way then the VAT rules apply to you. However, if you sell a product like a webinar which includes you having to do something in person then you may be exempt.

However, if there is only 'minimal' human intervention then you are not. Equally, a bit of manual intervention is not enough as this Facebook post suggests:

HMRC have tried to explain the complexities in this doc.

If you're understandably not sure what constitutes minimal, write to your tax authority for clarification. I bet they love the EU right now. All that extra work. Fun!

What's been repealed

UK changes

Although governments are wary of ignoring the EU VAT rules wholesale, there have been some improvements by national governments. The UK government, for example, has said that while sellers under the UK VAT threshold are still obliged to register for VAT in the UK to use MOSS, they won't need to charge UK VAT on their UK sales.

Although governments are wary of ignoring the EU VAT rules wholesale, there have been some improvements by national governments.

A spokesperson for HMRC said: "Businesses below the current VAT registration threshold that can separate their sales to UK customers from sales to EU customers can voluntarily register the cross border element of their business, and then use that registration number to register for MOSS. This means that their domestic sales will remain VAT free."

You can read more in this gov.uk article: just scroll down to the 'Businesses currently below the UK VAT registration threshold' section.

The UK government has also said that "the ‘light touch’ allowing UK businesses to accept one piece of customer location data has been extended indefinitely beyond the 30th June." Previously, customers had to provide two pieces of 'proof' from a list. You can read more in this article First VATMOSS Returns – Notes and Queries.

The customer location requirement continues to be a source of contention though, particularly IP addresses:

EU-wide changes

We're based in the UK so we're not as up-to-date about how other governments are handling (or ignoring) the new EU VAT rules. Tweet us @SendOwlHQ with any useful information for this section. Thanks!

What's been promised?

An EU VAT threshold. Wohoot!

On 6th May the European Commission published its Digital Single Market strategy. Buried among a lot of EU puffery, was the promise of an EU VAT threshold "to help small start-up e-commerce businesses." This initiative is pencilled in for 2016, although at this stage legislation is proposed, not necessarily enacted.

What does this mean for me?

At the moment, it means you are still meant to comply with the EU VAT rules, whether you sell two ebooks to the EU or 2,000. However, we hope that next year will bring better news for small digital product businesses.

What are people now campaigning for?

Many people have been campaigning for a VAT threshold that will exempt small sellers from having to comply with the new rules. A €100,000 threshold has been talked about by the EU, although many campaigners want it to be higher.

The EU VAT Action campaign also wants an emergency interim EU VAT suspension from the UK Government while the slow wheels of EU bureaucracy grind into action. In theory, I think, any country could apply this emergency interim suspension.

Some campaigners like Enterprise Nation have been campaigning for a technical solution that will solve the EU VAT problem for small businesses. However, this approach has been challenged as unworkable by programmers like Rachel Andrews, by us, and by other campaigners.

Concluding thoughts

Although the EU VAT rules were well intentioned – to prevent companies like Amazon tax dodging – they have caused many small digital businesses considerable confusion, pain and expense. This is because the EU, and even national politicians, have displayed a surprisingly limited understanding of how the digital economy works, particularly the role played by dynamic and independently-minded small businesses. They are now better informed and, seemingly, working towards a revised set of EU VAT rules that don't unfairly penalise small businesses.

We're under no illusions that there will be a quick progress, but discussions do seem to be heading in the right direction, as a recent video by the EU VAT Action Campaign made clear.

After all, the EU is planning to roll out the new rules to cover physical as well as digital products. They'll need to get a solution in place before this second stage is launched, unless they want hundreds of thousands of physical product sellers to start thumping on their doors as well.

So, our best advice for now is to hang on in there. After all, what we're doing is the future, and a bit of badly thought out legislation is not going to change that!

We're under no illusions that there will be a quick progress, but discussions do seem to be heading in the right direction.

How does SendOwl help digital sellers with VAT?

Well, we care enough about our customers that we had your back covered in terms of the VAT rules at the start of this year. This was rather than waiting for you to send us angry emails and then reluctantly doing something six months later.

As a small privately owned company, we're dynamic, customer-focused, and independent (hence articles like this one: we don't have to suck up to anyone). We'll keep you informed about important developments that affect you, and we'll do our best to help you grow your business.

However, we're not a reseller of your products (meaning we don't get our greasy paws on your money, hold on to it for weeks, and then take a cut) so we can't pay your VAT for you.

Here are some more details about our VAT solution:

How SendOwl will help you

SendOwl automatically charges the correct amount of tax for all EU transactions including rates for ebooks and audio books
We'll store the evidence of buyer location for up to ten years as requested by the EU, so you don't have to
We've kept the checkout process as streamlined as possible for your buyers so you won't lose sales because of these new rules
Set up of this new feature is easy – select one checkbox and you're good to go, with the small exception that if you sell ebooks or audio books you'll need to choose your product type in advanced settings
You don't need to read hundreds of pages about EU VAT because we've done it for you
We'll keep you informed about the EU VAT changes, offering lots of helpful advice, statistics as we gather them, and sarcasm when we can't help ourselves.

What we can't do

Submit quarterly returns and pay tax
Tip a truck load of banana skins outside the EU parliament and film what happens

We now integrate with marketing automation tool Drip

2015-06-30T00:00:00Z

We know that our Sendowl sellers take their buyer management and marketing very seriously. After all, it's much easier to sell to existing customers than it is to new customers, so nurturing buyers post-sale makes a lot of sense. So, we thought Drip integration would help some of you out. Let us know how you get on!

What is Drip?

Drip is a marketing automation tool for startups, consultants and basically anybody who sells digital products. It's affordable and works pretty well, hence their cheeky strapline: "Lightweight Marketing Automation That Doesn’t Suck".

If you're not sure what marketing automation is, then it basically means using email to strategically communicate with leads and customers without having to hand-craft every email. The point of it all is to make more sales, faster.

The automation angle resonates with us, because at SendOwl we want to free you up from the boring stuff (product delivery, payment processing, and so on) so you can concentrate on the more amusing side of running a digital products business.

And life is definitely too short to have to sit manually emailing everyone who has bought one of your products.

How does Drip work?

For SendOwl customers, Drip can be used in a number of different ways:

You can sell an email course through SendOwl and use Drip to deliver it
You can sell a digital product and use Drip to nurture buyers, with an email sequence, for example, so they are more likely to make another purchase.
You can sell a product through your email list, using SendOwl, and then use Drip to qualify the buyer, by adding them to a more relevant email list.

SendOwl sends Drip details of the buyer, what they bought and how much they spent. This means you can tailor your campaigns in a very targeted way.

Check out the Drip website for more information.

How can I integrate Drip and SendOwl

We've made it simple as possible – it should only take a few minutes. Have a look at our Configuring Drip help article for more information.

Eight new features

2015-06-12T00:00:00Z

Over the last two months we've been working on lots of new SendOwl features, from Dropbox integration to trust icons and product images for your shopping cart. Although some of your might have noticed the new features, we've not really had a chance to promote them. Until now! So, here's our roundup post of new features to help you kick off a profitable summer!

Dropbox integration

Your customers now have the option of saving their new digital product to Dropbox. They simply need to select 'Save to Dropbox' on the download screen. This shows automatically on the downloads page for any orders that have digital goods when the option is enabled under Settings and Downloads.

Faster downloads as standard

Downloads are now issued from the Edge, meaning they are much faster. However, they have the same security protection as before. If you're not sure what the Edge is, it basically means that your file is copied to 37 destinations worldwide so that your customers will automatically download from the server closest to them. This means the download speed is much faster.

Add product images to your shopping cart

You can now upload a product image that will appear in a customer's shopping cart, making your product look more enticing and helping to reduce cart abandonment (also see our blog post on increasing your checkout conversion rate for more tips).

When you're adding a product, you have the choice of adding a product image under the Advanced Settings. Any image format is acceptable, although it needs to be at least 250px wide. We'll then resize as appropriate.

Finally, go to Checkout then Checkout Options and tick 'Show product images in cart'. This means all your product images will display when your product has been added to a cart.

Add trust icons to your cart

Although the debate continues as to whether adding trust icons actually increases buyer confidence, we've had enough requests for this feature that we'd like to give you the choice.

To add trust icons, go to Checkout then Checkout Options and tick the 'Show payment page trust icons'. Your customers will then see our SendOwl logo, your payment gateway logo and a security lock on the payment page.

MadMimi integration

MadMimi is an email marketing tool that you can use to send newsletters. We've had a number of requests for MadMimi integration, so here you are! For more information, read our help article on configuring MadMimi

Always make continue shopping option appear

Previously, the continue shopping option only appeared on small screens (like mobiles) or when your customers opened the checkout in a new tab. Now, you have the choice to make it always appear. Go to Checkout and Checkout Options and check the 'Always show cart Continue Shopping button'.

Make sure products are only added to a cart once

Customers sometimes mistakenly add a few copies of your digital product to their cart only to realise their mistake after checkout – at which point they are annoyed and you need to sort out a refund. To avoid this scenario, you can now limit a product to be only added once to your cart.

To enable this option, go to Advanced Settings for each of your products and check the 'single quantity limit in cart' option.

Search intelligently

We've improved our dashboard search to make it much easier for you to search through your products, orders and discount codes. It now handles searching on more fields (buyer name, Shopify order number, license key and so on) and partial matching.

Summary

We're often rolling out small updates without too much fuss. We thought these eight were worth flagging up though, because we've had quite a few requests for them. Let us know how you get on @SendOwlHQ.

We now support shipping!

2015-06-03T00:00:00Z

Although we're mainly known as a platform for digital product sellers, we do support the sale of physical products as well. However, we've not made it all that easy to sell physical products because we haven't supported shipping. This has now changed! After much hard work by our development team, we're delighted to announce the launch of our new shipping functionality. This means that you can sell to all corners of the globe, secure in the knowledge that you can charge the correct amount of shipping no matter where your product is heading.

After many conversations with SendOwl sellers, we appreciate that a significant number of you want the flexibility to be able to sell both physical and digital products. Perhaps you sell an audio download, but also post out a CD. Or you have a book that offer for sale as both a print item and a digital download. We've taken onboard your comments, and have added shipping functionality as a result.

Choose shipping rates based on price or weight

You can set shipping rates based on price or weight – it's up to you. You can also choose different options for different countries and states offering you maximum flexibility.

SendOwl shipping is easy to set up and manage

We've tried to keep the 'add shipping' process as simple as possible. Once you've created your shipping rules for different countries and states, then SendOwl will automatically add shipping to your customers' bill at checkout (and of course we'll only add shipping for physical products – even if the order includes digital products as well!).

It's as simple as that

As with all SendOwl features we've kept shipping as simple as possible to set up. For more information about setting up shipping see our shipping knowledge base article. We hope this new feature makes it easier for you to run your business selling both digital and physical products. You can rely on us to keep adding new features that will simplify your life - so you can concentrate on the fun stuff!

Boost Your Digital Product Sales With an Affiliate Scheme

2015-05-28T00:00:00Z

An affiliate scheme is a great way to increase your digital product sales without having to do a lot of extra marketing yourself. In effect, it is about getting other people to sell your products for you. What's not to like about that? In this post, we show you what an affiliate scheme is, how the relationship works, and why an affiliate scheme can be an effective way to grow your digital goods business.

What is an affiliate scheme?

An affiliate scheme is a great way to boost your sales by recruiting a team of marketers to promote your product on your behalf. Affiliate schemes are used by sellers of all sizes to increase sales and reach customers they wouldn't otherwise have found.

Even large companies like Amazon use affiliates to find new customers and boost sales

How an affiliate relationship works

You agree to pay affiliates a % of sales, so the more products they help you sell, the more money they earn. This relationship gives affiliates an incentive to be as effective as possible in marketing your product.

You can reward successful affiliates with a % boost in their commission rates, if they achieve a certain sales goal. You can also offer different % rates for different products, depending on their value and marketability.

How do you find affiliates?

Although the big companies have recruiting pages on their sites that offer them a steady stream of talent, you'll probably need to reach out to affiliates yourself, particularly if you haven't anything on your site in terms of affiliate recruitment.

It's better to find a few high quality affiliates rather than lots of affiliates who will spam your product everywhere

Look for people in the same area as you who have a good following either through a website, email list or social media. For example, if you sell knitting and crochet patterns you are looking for people with authority in this field. If you look outside your area, your affiliate will struggle to find good prospects.

Choose an affiliate who is influential in your field

You'll probably know some people already who would make good affiliates for your company, so approaching them is straightforward. It can be worth reaching out to other people who you don't know, or only know by reputation, if they look like a good fit though.

It's a good idea to check whether potential affiliates have done affiliate marketing before. If they have, they are more likely to be interested and to understand what's involved. You should be able to tell by browsing someone's website, newsletter or social media feed whether they are an affiliate marketer.

It's better to find a few high quality affiliates rather than lots of affiliates who will spam your product everywhere (this is why affiliate marketplaces should be approached with caution).

Will using affiliates make it harder to control your brand?

This shouldn't be a problem if you take care to choose high quality affiliates who broadly share your values (so, if you believe that slowly developing fruitful relationships with customers is more important than doing the hard sell, you should choose affiliates who support this approach).

Most ecommerce platforms with affiliate schemes (like SendOwl) also give you the choice of enabling affiliates to sell directly from their site (with a buy button actually on their site) or they simply funnel sales to your website. The latter means you retain more control over the sales process.

A screenshot of the SendOwl affiliate system - we make it super easy to get setup

Affiliates don't have access to your sales or financial data, so there shouldn't be any security issues in setting up an affiliate scheme.

How much do you offer affiliates?

Commission rates completely vary between 10-90%. Sometimes sellers offer 100% just to get the details of buyers. However, the average is about 30%.

You can offer to pay more to people if they reach a certain volume of sales.

What do you need to give affiliates to promote your product?

Your affiliates will do a much better job marketing your product if you provide them with some marketing assets: copy about the product, product images, any promotional videos, and so on.

For example, here's some of the images we let people use if they're promoting SendOwl.

We also use these images to make our brand stand out from our competition

How do you track affiliate sales?

You really need a third party with an affiliate scheme, like SendOwl, to track your affiliates. These third parties will provide you with a special unique link for every affiliate. When a buyer clicks on this link it sets a cookie on their computer so when they buy a product, either immediately or in a few weeks time, then the ecommerce system will know which affiliate referred the order and allocate them the money.

Another reason to use a third party to track affiliate sales is that it puts your relationship with affiliates on a professional footing. If you use self-reporting then doubts and disagreements can easily creep in.

How do you pay affiliates?

At the end of every month your ecommerce provider or affiliate tracking system will total up the money you owe to different affiliates. You'll then need to make these payment via PayPal or another payment gateway.

Why should I give away so much money to affiliates?

Although it seems like you're losing out by giving affiliates a decent % cut of every sale, you're in fact getting a whole new bunch of sales you wouldn't otherwise have got. So although margin on these sales is lower, you're making sales you wouldn't normally have made.

You need to treat affiliates like they're franchisees. You're running a business and they're running a business...Remember, your success naturally follows the success of your affiliates. If you can remember that, you're in good shape.

SendOwl seller Daniel Gold, founder of productivity website DEG Consulting, found that the setting up an affiliate network enabled him to create a passive income revenue stream as well as to quickly increase his market share. He shared some excellent points with us:

Why did you decide to set up an affiliate scheme?

Being able to have an affiliate scheme has enabled me to do three things: 1) leverage other people who are passionate about my products and services to their followers while at the same time earning a passive revenue stream for themselves; 2) increase my market share in the productivity space as a result of my affiliates; and 3) create a passive income revenue stream for myself.

Has it worked out well for you?

Lucratively! Leveraging affiliates has absolutely allowed me to penetrate the market much faster than I could do myself.

What were the particular challenges of setting up an affiliate scheme?

The biggest challenge in setting up an affiliate scheme is attracting affiliates. You need to understand what's in it for them? What incentives are you offering? What do you have by way of a product or service that will motivate them to want to evangelize your offering? Knowing what sets you apart and getting some early adopters to share their successes and spread the message to other potential affiliates is huge.

Were there any aspects of setting up an affiliate scheme that were easier that you expected?

Setting up the affiliate scheme with SendOwl was very easy to do. Add in the ability to have prompt customers service whenever I had a question, and it was that much easier for me. The website is fluid, and the setup was laid out in a simple, template-driven fashion.

What tips or advice would you give to other sellers who are considering setting up an affiliate scheme?

You need to treat affiliates like they're franchisees. You're running a business and they're running a business. If you don't have a well thought out strategy of how your franchisees (affiliates) are going to be successful, then it'll fail. Remember, your success naturally follows the success of your affiliates. If you can remember that, you're in good shape.

Advantages of the SendOwl affiliate scheme

It's bundled in with your ecommerce system so you don't need two separate systems
You can choose commission rates on a per product rate and give special rates to certain affiliates
You can ban affiliates who abuse your trust
All the reporting is automated – you just need to pay at the end of the month
We'll provide all the links, tracking, reporting and so on so you have as little work to do as possible

Conclusion

Setting up an affiliate scheme is a great way to boost your sales and reach more customers. Although it requires you to invest some time up front, because you need to find, contact and persuade suitable affiliates to work with you, the results can be considerable, particularly over the longer-term. You can find out more about the SendOwl affiliate scheme in our help article.

Upsells and cross-sells increase your total revenue by 10%

2015-05-27T00:00:00Z

A few months ago we launched one click pre-payment and post-checkout upsells. Now, we've crunched our data to see how much extra revenue they've been bringing in for our sellers. And the good news? On average, sellers using upsells and cross-sells are earning 10% more revenue. That's 10% extra money for doing pretty much nothing!

Update: Newer data is now available in our 2016 blog post do upsells make you more moeny

Do upsells and cross-sells really make you more money?

Yes! We're very excited to announce that sellers actively using upsells on average are making an extra 10% revenue. That's 10% more money for doing practically nothing.

SendOwl seller Craig Clarke, founder of keto diet website Ruled.me and meal plan site Keto Academy, has found that his average order value has increased by about 20% after using upsells and cross-sells:

My results have been pretty great. I find that my average overall order value increased by about 20%.

Craig also suggests that being strategic about testing and implementing upsells and cross-sells will pay dividends:

Make sure that you're not relying on only short term results to dictate a decision. If you're testing out certain upsells, make sure you have enough of a sample size to determine if it's working or not working.

Also, don't try to upsell products that aren't related to each other. I think one of the reasons that my upsells do so well is that they add value to what I'm already selling. If a potential customer is in a buying state of mind, then an upsell of something related and useful to them is usually a pretty easy choice.

How did we measure the effect of upsells?

First, we waited a couple of months to give sellers time to set up upsells and cross-sells and take a statistically significant number of orders.

We then took all the people who had upsells available on the majority of their products and were actively using them (rather than just testing them out).

We then looked at how much extra sellers made as a result of the upsells and divided this by the total of their orders had they not had the extra orders. This gave us their extra % increase.

We saw some sellers making over 20% extra with upsells and cross-sells, with the average at just over 10%.

We saw some sellers making over 20% extra with upsells and cross-sells, with the average at just over 10%

How can you ensure equally great results with upsells and cross-sells?

Here are a few tips that should help you increase the % extra revenue that upsells and cross-sells bring in:

Make sure your upsells and cross-sells are relevant to your customers. For example, if someone asks you if you want fries with your burger you almost feel like they are doing you a favour (now you come to mention it, fries are the perfect accompaniment...). However, if someone asks: 'do you want a pork dumpling with that?' you'd be forgiven for getting annoyed because if you wanted something like a pork dumpling you would have ordered it in the first place!
See whether pre-payment or post-checkout upsells or cross-sells work best for your company. Theorising which will work best is okay, but nowhere near as effective as real-life testing.
Consider using discounts to encourage people to spend more. That way, customers think they are getting a good deal too. So, you could offer customers a 10% discount on an ebook bundle, which would still make you more money, but sounds more attractive to a customer than simply saying 'why not spend an extra $40?'.
Think about adding a photo or video to your cross-sell or upsell to make it more attractive to customers.

My results have been pretty great. I find that my average overall order value increased by about 20%. Over time can add up to quite a lot of extra capital flowing into your business.

Concluding thoughts

Upsells and cross-sells are (officially!) a great way to encourage your customers to spend more with very little effort involved for you. If you haven't already, why not see how upsells and cross-sells can benefit your company?

EU VAT threshold promised

2015-05-06T00:00:00Z

On 6th May the European Commission published its Digital Single Market strategy. Buried among a lot of EU puffery, is the promise of an EU VAT threshold "to help small start-up e-commerce businesses." This initiative is pencilled in for 2016, although at this stage legislation is proposed, not necessarily enacted. However, we should take what joy we can from what has otherwise been a confusing, costly and annoying piece of legislation for many SMEs. Hang on in there folks!

Reducing the administrative burden for small sellers

Although the report is awash with largely unjustified assertions (the EU is "Making it easier for innovators to start their own company" apparently), the questions and answers fact sheet gets down to the nitty gritty. Under point number 5, you'll find a section called "Reducing VAT related burden and obstacles when selling across borders". Wohoot!

Buried among a lot of EU puffery, is the promise of an EU VAT threshold "to help small start-up e-commerce businesses."

This section is about how the Commission will make legislative proposals in 2016 "to reduce the administrative burden on businesses arising from different VAT regimes". They will do this by:

Introducing a common EU-wide simplification measure - VAT threshold - to help small start-up e-commerce businesses.

Finally! We don't know what this threshold will be as yet, although the language ('small' 'start-up') suggests that many small sellers will no longer have to comply with this legislation . We'll see though, and anything is better than nothing. After all, it's the small sellers among us who are suffering the most disproportionately from this legislation.

Later on in the fact sheet, the Commission further clarifies:

The level and type of threshold will be considered as part of the impact assessment for the proposal. In addition to the measures outlined in the Strategy, preparatory work has started to prepare a comprehensive future initiative on reducing the VAT compliance costs for SMEs in general. This is initiative is foreseen for 2016.

Reviewing the VAT Mini One Stop Shop and the 2015 Place of Supply rules

This is what the Commission has to say on MOSS:

It was already envisaged that an analysis of the implementation of the VAT Mini One Stop Shop (MOSS) and the 2015 Place of Supply rules would take place as part of our commitment to simplify cross-border VAT rules. The Commission sees this as a timely opportunity to take stock of the issues which both tax administrations and business face, and address these in the context of the 2016 proposal.

We think this means that they'll be looking at the reporting tool, although to be honest we don't know.

Appraising VAT rates for electronic services such as ebooks and other epublications

Some countries have been matching their ebook VAT rates to their physical VAT rates (seems reasonable to us), but the European Court of Justice has recently ruled that you can't do that. The Commission has now said:

The Commission will explore how to address the tax treatment of digital books and online publications in the context of the work being done on the adoption of a definitive VAT regime. The Communication setting out the main features of the definitive VAT regime will be adopted next year.

Why the new EU legislation will benefit us all, according to the EU

"The level and type of threshold will be considered as part of the impact assessment for the proposal." – Commission

The fact sheet gives us a helpful list of the advantages of their actions, just in case the mention of the EU VAT rules has made us a bit angry:

"Simplicity – A business only has to deal with one tax administration which in itself is a significant simplification." Although of course before these rules you would only have been dealing with your own tax authority anyway.
"A level playing field – there will be no difference in VAT rates between goods ordered from websites in third countries, other Member States or domestically."
"Certainty – Clear rules allow business to plan for engaging in cross-border e-commerce. Furthermore the same rules will apply for goods and services." As the new EU VAT rules in 2015 have demonstrated the EU excels in providing clarity. Or not.

A big shout out for all those tireless EU VAT campaigners

Considering the amount of snubbing, avoidance and general disinclination to discuss the issue that we were presented with only a few months ago from the EU, this latest news is a huge achievement. So, congratulations to everyone who has brought the problems with the EU VAT rules to the attention of their government, the media, and the EU (and a special mention goes to the EU VAT Action Campaign Group). If we're seeing change, it's because of you!

Concluding thoughts

It's easy to be cynical of a report called "Bringing down barriers to unlock online opportunities" when many SMEs have instead experienced more barriers and fewer opportunities thanks to the 2015 EU VAT rules. However, it is encouraging that the Commission has promised an EU VAT threshold, and has at least admitted that the bureaucratic burden on many businesses selling cross border needs to be reduced. We'll keep our fingers, toes, arms and feet crossed that we see sensible and swift progress on this issue within the next year. In the meantime, you can rely on us here at SendOwl to do everything we can to help you grow your digital products business.

Note: We published this a few hours after this EU report was released so more details may occur in the next few days. We'll update this post as more information becomes available.

How to hire people for your startup or SME

2015-04-30T00:00:00Z

Image credit

Your team is your company's greatest asset, so you want to make sure you attract and hire candidates who will be a great fit. As it turns out this is a really difficult thing to do. The 'traditional' way of interviewing candidates by asking what they have done rather than testing how they work and think, rarely gets the best results. And the cost of taking on the wrong person is high: you have to hire again, train again and disrupt your existing team again. We've made mistakes hiring before, but lately have really nailed down our process. In this post we'll share how we hire at SendOwl, using our two most recent hiring experiences - a senior level Rails developer and a customer support person - to show what we do and why.

A bit of background on SendOwl

SendOwl is a bootstrapped ecommerce platform for digital products. We help entrepreneurs sell everything from indie video games to house designs and crochet patterns. We're four years old, more profitable than many large VC-backed firms (Twitter for example!), and growing fast.

As we've grown we've brought on new staff to expand existing teams or create new ones. Support, for example, was handled by our development team until it was taking several hours per day and we needed a dedicated support team. This is partly the nature of startups: one person starts doing everything and then passes on their responsibilities to others as the company grows.

When recruiting it's important to find the person with the right skills and the right personality for your company. Mess it up and you'll either find yourself doing most of the work anyway, or working with somebody you don't like! Oh yes, and you're probably going to be recruiting somebody with way more experience in the field than you have (hat-tip: hire people in the fields you have least experience in first, as they'll be able to create the most impact). So really, it's not surprising the whole hiring process can go wrong.

So, how can you make it work for you? Well here's what we've learnt over the last few years covering everything from advert writing right through to making an offer.

Your team is your company's greatest asset, so you want to make sure you attract candidates who will be a great fit for your team.

Writing a job advert

This is your first contact with potential team members - you need to make it a good one. You need to appeal to the type of person who will be a good fit for your team in such a way that they think: "I have to work for these people".

You need to communicate what your company does, what you're about, what matters to you, and what doesn't. You also need to attract the kind of person who would be a good fit with your company. For example, we said in our last two job adverts that we're a bootstrapped ecommerce platform for digital products. The 'bootstrapped' bit is important because we're proud to be so, and we operate in a lean way. We appeal to people who are independently-minded and like a bit of flexibility. On the other hand, we're not a good fit for people who get excited about a long-hours startup culture where there is a lot of money floating around to spend on stuff like pizza, ping pong tables and beer.

In our job adverts, we also tried to show people what matters to us. We wanted to communicate to potential team members that we're friendly, approachable, straightforward and have a bit of a (British, ahem) sense of humour. After all, that's what we communicate to customers. So, we made sure our job adverts were easy to read, that the style was informal, and that we backed up our claims. Instead of saying that we're 'friendly', which means nothing really, we wrote:

We mainly work remotely, we get the job done but largely work when we want to, and we won't get snarky if your kid is sick or you need a day off to argue with estate agents or builders (it happens to the best of us).

As well as differentiating yourself on style, we'd suggest pulling out key differentiators which will get you noticed by good candidates. For example, we offer flexibility and remote working which appeals to people who want a good work-life balance, work from a different region or country, want to avoid a long commute, or want to spend quality time with their family.

One thing we missed, and only learnt in our last set of interviews, is the need to highlight that we offer British holidays (roughly five weeks a year) when we're trying to attract US candidates. The typical holiday period in the US is around 10 days and employees don't always take it all. This seems crazy to us - fresh employees get much more work done than burnt out ones. However, it's a great selling point for us and some of the reactions from candidates have been hilarious: "Did I hear you right? Did you just say five weeks holiday?!"

Part of our job advert

Where you advertise

You need to reach out to places where your ideal candidates hang out. For our support person we were looking for someone outside the UK to cover additional timezones, so we posted on WeWorkRemotely and SupportOps. For our developer we wanted someone UK based so we advertised on various tech lists and via our locals networks.

We also experimented with the way we described the job post on social media: some of our tweets were pretty standard ('We're looking to take on a UK-based Rails dev...'), while others highlighted differentiating features ('Flexible and friendly Rails dev job...').

Take time to figure out where people might be looking for jobs, and don't restrict yourself to the kind of places that you know and like (there's new sites and networks popping up all the time!). We don't use recruiters ourselves because they are expensive and we don't think they add value.

Filtering applications

If you've done the previous steps well you may end up with a lot of applications, although of course it depends on the role. We got 7-8 great candidates for our developer role, which was quite a result considering how in demand talented senior level Rails developers are in the UK. However, because our customer support role required less specialisation and was open to candidates all over the world, we had over two hundred applications. So, we needed to do some filtering!

Clearly with two hundred applicants, you can't spend too much time on every application otherwise it would take forever. We scanned applications and looked for 'shout out' points. These included:

stand out emails (one or two people created a custom site or had obviously taken time to find out about us)
had similar experience in a previous role
had previously worked at a similar type of company - so they might know something about ecommerce, for example
succinct CVs - 1-2 pages were the most appealing
customised subject lines in their initial email (95%+ used "SendOwl support position" or similar so anything different from that stood out)
something of interest - e.g. a tweet that got our attention

Which of these subject lines stands out the most?

Warning signs were:

spelling and grammatical errors
cut and paste responses
writing 'to whom it might concern' when we put George's name on the job advert
people who didn't read the job advert and failed to send us an example of a good customer experience
people who wrote rambling essays
people who had vastly different experience and didn't justify the change in direction
people that jumped around a lot (lots of 2-4 month jobs) - we wanted someone for the long-term
people who prioritised a hard luck story

From the two hundred we got it down to a shortlist of 40 potentials. We then did a second round of filtering and got it down to 20 for first round interviews.

First round interviews

So far we've done all first round interviews online. For the support role, due to the number of people we were interviewing, we had to limit each interview to 30 minutes, which was tight. We covered:

some initial information about SendOwl and the role
we asked candidates about their career history
we tested any special skills, for example, we asked the developers to do a code test and the support people to answer some sample tickets
we gave candidates the opportunity to ask any questions
we discussed money and practicalities like their current notice period

Our main goals for this round were to a) test performance, b) determine character and values, and c) work out candidates' long-term ambitions. Let's look at each in turn:

Testing

You learn much more working with a person for just 10 minutes than you ever will in an hour of questioning.

In our experience, testing usually involves an interviewer asking a candidate a question with a 'correct' answer, which they are expected to work out. This seem silly to us: that's stuff that can be taught. We were much more interested in the process that our candidates went through to reach an answer. After all, we can teach knowledge, but working practices and the way someone thinks are much more difficult to alter. They are also a great litmus test for how enthusiastic and knowledgeable a person is about their field.

To give you some examples of our testing process: for the developer position we looked at how candidates broke down a problem into manageable bits, as well as what they did when we changed the requirements half way through. For the support position, we looked to see if candidates understood what was going on beneath the written text of the support email and how they broke down their response. You learn more working with a person for just ten minutes than you ever will in an hour of questioning.

How the person approached this question and the understanding they had of what the customer was thinking is way more interesting than the actual answer they come up with

Character

Once you've established whether a person can do the job, the next question is will they fit on your team? A good way to determine this is to write down your company values and work out if they align with theirs. For example, some of our company values are: simplicity, honesty and ownership. So we prodded candidates to see if they had demonstrated these qualities in previous roles. Even if someone excels at the testing stage, you'll run into trouble in the future if their values don't align with yours.

Long-term ambition

Finally, what are the long-term ambitions of your candidates? We spoke to lots of people who passed our testing and character criteria, but who were only looking to do support for 1-2 years as a stop gap to getting into something else. This may be fine for your company, but it wasn't for us. People sometimes lie here so it's good to have them on video so you can watch their body language for signs that they're fibbing!

First round summary

The aim of the first round interview was to get an overview of each candidate, to work out whether they ticked all our boxes, and also whether we wanted to work with them. Basically, we identified people who we wanted to have a deeper conversation with. It's tempting to put through everyone who seems like they could do the job and who is fairly nice, but we only put through people we really wanted to work with.

At this stage, you'll be rejecting a few really good candidates because they're not a great fit for your company. It's good practice to send them an email with honest feedback about why you didn't ask them for a second round interview.

Second round interviews

Employers seems obsessed about hiring the most capable person. We'd take somebody who we liked the most any day of the week, even if they weren't the most capable - or even the second most capable (this assumes of course that they passed our tests and values criteria). So for us, the second round is all about finding the candidate that will be the best fit for our company.

Employers seems obsessed about hiring the most capable person. We'd take somebody who we liked the most any day of the week, even if they weren't the most capable - or even the second most capable.

For this interview round, we had a few team members on the interview panel so we could share our thoughts about the candidates and ask a wider range of questions. This is a particularly good idea if you have someone on your team with expertise in the candidate's area - after all, they're going to be spending more time with the person than you so you want to make sure they get on.

As the first round interview for our customer support role were only thirty minutes, due to the number of applicants, we were particularly keen to spend some more time with the candidates. We focused on two areas: discussing our working practices, and having a deeper conversation about something the candidates were knowledgeable about. Let's look at each in turn:

Our working practices

As a bootstrapped company spread over multiple timezones, we don't have time to micro-manage. Even if we had the time we wouldn't do it as it sucks! We give our employees a lot of responsibility and we expect them to take ownership. It's the kind of responsibility you'd get in a senior job, so we needed to be sure our candidates could handle it. We talked about how we worked on a recent project, and asked them about how they'd worked in the past and if they had any similar experiences. This kind of discussion a) helps you establish whether the potential employee can work in your style and b) helps the candidate establish what the reality of working for you will be like. It's also good to throw in some fun stuff that the company does at this stage, so the interview isn't just about work.

Look at all these happy people! You won't be doing 'team building' days like this at SendOwl! [photo credit]

A deeper conversation

As our aim was to get to know the person, we spent most of the time in this round chatting to the candidate with no fixed agenda. We had a few basic questions lined up, but let the conversation develop in a natural manner. For example, we might say: "Tell me a little bit more about what you did in support for Apple?" and then the candidate would talk about a new programme they headed up. From there, we'd talk about how the programme worked, how you could adapt it to a smaller company, what support at Apple was like, and what they saw as Apple's biggest challenges in the future. And so on. In effect, we talked in detail on a few subjects to see how well formed their thoughts were on the subject and if we liked the way they thought. Free-flowing, in-depth discussion is a great way to find out how well you connect with candidates.

What if you can't decide?

With some luck, one candidate will really stand out and you can go ahead and make them an offer. For our support role, however, we found ourselves torn between two excellent candidates. There was really very little to choose between them and we just couldn't decide. So after much discussion, we decided to call both candidates and talk about what was holding us back from offering them the role. We were basically trying to see if our niggling concerns were genuine or simply the result of not going over something in enough detail.

These extra conversations only took about fifteen minutes each, but gave us a much better idea of who would suit us best (and who we would suit best, which is just as important).

Making an offer

Congratulations - it's now time to make your offer

Now for the fun part! You get to offer the job to your favourite candidate. Although this isn't something we've come across before, do bear in mind that candidates may have several offers on the table. So don't reject other candidates until your offer has been accepted and you have something signed! Once you've done this, take the time to reach out to candidates you've rejected. They've invested a fair bit of time in the interviews so the least you can do is offer them some helpful feedback.

Conclusion

Hiring somebody new is one of your most important tasks a business owner or hiring manager has to do. If you hire the wrong person you'll have wasted a lot of time and money, as well as caused considerable disruption to your existing team. So it's worth investing plenty of time and thought in the interview process to secure someone who is a great fit for your company and who will stick around. To do this, you'll need to work out who you want and communicate that in the job advert; you'll need to test candidates to make sure they have the skills to do the job; and you'll need to work out how they'll fit into your company, both now and in the future.

Custom Checkout Fields

2015-04-29T00:00:00Z

We're pleased to announce the launch of custom checkout fields. We know that every business is different; so we want to make it as easy as possible for you to customise the checkout process to suit your specific business needs. Custom checkout fields make it easy for you to ask for extra information from your customers, for example, information about what size or shape of product they want, what their telephone number is, or perhaps what their account number is if they belong to a large organisation.

Why are custom checkout fields useful?

We keep the checkout process as simple, responsive and easy-to-use as possible to ensure you get a respectable conversion rate. However, we appreciate that each business is different and that you might need to ask your customers for additional specific information during checkout. We've created custom checkout fields so you can do exactly that.

How do you set up custom checkout fields?

Simply go to Settings > Checkout > Custom Fields. You'll then have the chance to create as many custom fields as you need. We also give you a few options when you ask customers for information: you can use a checkbox, dropdown menu, radio buttons or simply a text box. You can also specify if the custom field should appear for all your products or just for one, and whether customers need to give you the information or whether it's optional.

Basically, we'll tried to make sure that you can customise your custom checkout fields so they are as useful as possible!

What will my customers see?

Even if you create a few custom fields, your customers will simply see one extra screen, in the same style as the others:

You can even order the fields on the setup page so your customers see questions in a certain order.

Final thoughts

We're committed to providing you with great new features that will make your life easier (and your business more profitable!). Custom checkout fields have been much requested so we look forward to seeing how they make a difference to your business. Good luck and happy customising!

For more information about setting up custom checkout fields please see our help article

EU VAT reporting

2015-03-30T00:00:00Z

One of the requirements of the 2015 EU VAT rules is that you upload a report to MOSS every calendar quarter. Unsurprisingly, details about what's required and how to do this have been a bit slim on the ground. However, we've done the reading, gnashed our teeth, and finally come up with a list of what you have to do. In this post we share our experiences, as well as reassure our sellers that we've done all the hard work, so they don't have to. In fact, we've generated a custom report for all our sellers with all the information they need, in the correct currency. Wohoot!

The process for submitting your VATMOSS return may vary slightly from country to country but the data required will remain the same; if in doubt, please check with your country's tax office. We're most familiar with the UK requirements.

When do I have to deal with EU VAT reporting?

You're meant to submit EU VAT reports at the end of every calendar quarter, so your first report is due in early April. Be aware that EU VAT quarters may not coincide with your VAT quarter so it's possible you'll have to submit a normal VAT return one month and a VAT MOSS return the next. Of course if your VAT returns align with calendar quarters you've lucked out!

One of the requirements of the 2015 EU VAT rules is that you upload a report to MOSS every calendar quarter.

You can't submit your report until the first day of the new quarter (otherwise you won't have all your data). Your deadline is twenty days later, so for your first report this will be the 20th April. However, you have to have paid any owed VAT by this date, so we recommend you consider the 16th April to be your deadline, just in case your payment isn't processed over the weekend, or a national holiday, or something else crops up.

What do I need to include in this report?

For each country outside your own you'll need to include:

The total amount charged
The VAT rate it was charged at
The total amount of VAT

Some countries, bless them, have different VAT rates for different digital products so you may need more than one line for each country.

You don't need to submit VAT information for buyers in your own country, because you'll include this in your country-specific tax return, as per normal.

How do I submit this information?

To avoid a Sisyphean situation where you have to register and pay VAT in every member state where you have customers, a special scheme has also been introduced called the Mini One Stop Shop (MOSS).

Although this might sound like a place where you buy a pint of milk, it's actually a portal which allows you to register in your member state, submit VAT returns and pay the relevant VAT – all in one place.

You can either submit an excel document (some countries will provide a template) or enter data for each country using the MOSS interface.

What currency do I need to use?

You should use the currency for the country you're based in. So, if you're using the UK MOSS interface because you're based in the UK, then you should use British pounds.

That's fine, unless you're selling in a different currency. In this case, you need to convert your report to the correct currency using the exchange rate as determined by the EU central bank on the last day of every quarter.

SendOwl seller reports will automatically use the correct currency.

How can SendOwl help?

We're glad you asked. Our team has spent many happy hours creating individual reports for every one of our sellers. Or rather, for sellers who have turned on the new EU VAT rules.

We've created custom reports for every seller, in the correct currency. This should make the reporting process a lot smoother and less time consuming for our sellers.

We'll email you about your report

This means that if you're a SendOwl seller, you'll get an email on 2nd day after a quarter ends saying that your personal EU VAT report is now available from a new tax reporting section on your dashboard.

This will have all the information you need to submit to MOSS. You won't need to get your accountant involved or make extra calculations.

We'll flag up any problematic transactions

The report, as well as summarising the numbers you need to submit, will also flag up problem transactions. You'll have already been notified of these and taken action – for example, if there was contradictory evidence about where a buyer was based.

There are very few of these occurring so it's really just to remind you to have all your extra evidence in order where required.

We'll automatically use the correct currency

By default, the report will be in the currency of the country where you're based. However, if you want to change the currency you can do via a link at the bottom of the report.

We'll walk you through submitting a return to MOSS

As soon as MOSS is live, we'll pull together a help article with real screenshots that walks you through every stage of submitting your report to MOSS. This will appear here on the 2nd of April.

Basically though, you'll either need to copy and paste the information we provide into a spreadsheet to submit, or enter each summary line using the MOSS interface.

We would have liked to have provided you with a downloadable spreadsheet report, but we can't at the moment. Some countries haven't provided a template whereas others, like the UK, have rushed one out that is almost unusable.

Concluding thoughts

MOSS is meant to make your life easier, but seeing as this is the view of EU bureaucrats who probably think a 100-page PDF on drain management is a bit of light reading, it's not much consolation. We've also seen very little information about reporting, until recently, and even then it's not really been well thought out. So, in short, EU VAT MOSS reporting requirements are a pain if you're on your own. However, because we care about the mental well being of all our sellers, we've done everything we can to make reporting as easy as possible. We've created custom reports for every seller, in the correct currency. This way, our sellers can submit a MOSS report in their tea break without breaking a sweat. Wohoot!

How to improve your conversion rate: Part 2

2015-03-25T00:00:00Z

In our last conversion rate article, we looked at what you can do to get more people to press the 'buy now' button. In this article, we'll look at what you can do to maximise the number of people who make it through your checkout process. Although we've done everything we can our end to optimise the checkout experience, there are certain actions you can take that will also help increase your conversion rate.

1. Prepare your customer for checkout and what to expect

Customers abandon their shopping carts when something unexpected happens, for example, they are taken to a page they don't expect, they are given a payment option which sounds difficult, or they suddenly lose trust in your payment process. To reduce the likelihood of this happening, make sure you prepare your customers about what to expect.

For example, if you only give your customers the option to checkout via PayPal then make sure you mention this, and reassure customers that they can pay using a credit or debit card if they don't have a PayPal account. Some customers won't realise it is possible to pay on payment services such as PayPal without an account and will leave before they can find out.

Equally, some customers are confused when they end up on a PayPal payment page without prior warning. They wonder what's happened to the website they were on, why they are on a completely different type of page, and whether this is a mistake or a safety issue. Prepare them for this step and you'll relieve at least some of their concerns.

Adding your logo to your SendOwl checkout and your PayPal account should also help reassure customers that they are on track.

If you are a PayPal customer, also consider signing up to PayPal Express (SendOwl has PayPal Express integration), which has a more welcoming first payment page for customers as well as a better checkout flow.

PayPal Express has an improved checkout flow and better UI

2. Reassure your customer about security

Safety online is a big concern for consumers: according to econsultancy, 58.4% of respondents cited concerns about payment security as a reason for cart abandonment.

58.4% of people cited concerns about payment security as a reason for cart abandonment

Working with specialists

Reassuring your customers that specialists (like PayPal, Stripe and SendOwl) are handling their transaction helps them to feel safer, and are therefore more likely to hand over their hard earned cash. You can use logos or copy to let customers know that you'll be working with reputable experts to process their payment.

Trust symbols

Research is conflicting about whether adding trust symbols to checkout pages boosts your conversion rate. On the one hand, they are easy to forge and so can be perceived as meaningless and distracting. On the other, some customers actually do trust them. You can add trust symbols to checkout pages through SendOwl.

Look real

Showing customers that you are a real, helpful and reputable company should improve your conversion rate. For example, Econsultancy found that 33.3% of their respondents said a lack of contact details would deter them from completing the purchase. This is understandable because customers want to know that should they need help, they will get it. Plus you need to show that you aren't just some fraudsters who have skinned an ecommerce site!

Showing that you have a helpful customer service department up front can also help boost your conversion rate. You can do this by showing quotes from happy customers, by foregrounding your customer support contact details, or by having live customer support chat.

3. Customise your checkout

Customising your checkout experience will help reassure customers that they are 'on track', and prevent them experiencing that feeling of dislocation and confusion when they move from your beautifully designed site to a very different style of page.

As a SendOwl seller, you can get your cart, checkout and download pages to match your site. Just visit the Account tab and click Customizations in the sidebar to configure exactly how you'd like the pages to look. Or you can specify your own CSS for more advanced customisations.

Natalie Rousseau has uploaded a logo and matched her brand colours so the checkout seamlessly merges with her site

4. Make sure you have a clear pricing strategy up front

If your product is $9.99 make sure it's clearly labelled as that. There's nothing quite like reaching a checkout page to find the price higher than you expected – and what customers consider to be misleading pricing will lead to a nosedive in your conversion rate. However, we realise that with the new EU VAT rules, following this best practice may be surprisingly tricky.

20% of customers will abandon a cart if the checkout process is too long or confusing

For example, you might price your product at $9.99 but the actual cost to a customer depends on where they live and whether they are a VAT-registered business. So, if you want to be honest with your EU customers you might write: $9.99 + VAT up front. However, you then worry that this 'honest' pricing strategy might confuse or put off non-EU customers who don't pay VAT and recoil at the thought of it!

What to do? We suggest taking a look at your % split of EU v non-EU customers. If you have a lot of EU customers then the $9.99 + VAT route might work best; if you only have a few, or have blocked all EU sales because of the EU VAT rules, then just writing $9.99 would probably be best. If in doubt A/B test and see what impact, if any, these micro copy changes have on your conversion rate.

5. Offer different checkout options

According to WorldPay statistics, alternative payments account for 22% of global e-commerce transactions, worth a total of €165bn. Therefore, it makes sense to offer different payment methods and appeal to as many potential customers as possible.

SendOwl offers accounted payment services (such as PayPal), non-accounted payment services (such as Stripe), merchant account gateways (such as Authorize.net), innovative payment networks (such as Bitcoins) and European payment methods (like Bancontact). While not every option is available in every country, adding additional checkout options where possible gives customers the flexibility to pay how they want. This is an important point if you consider a payment gateway like PayPal, which has a group of loyal followers and a group of people who will avoid it at all costs.

6. Recover lost sales

If customers abandon your cart at some point during the process, don't automatically assume it's all over. A BI Intelligence 2014 report cited in Business Review Europe suggests that 63% of abandoned carts are potentially recoverable.

20% of cart abandoners return and purchase after retargeting

Where contact details are available for the buyer, it's often a good idea to follow up with them and see if there's anything you can do to help. They might be confused about something or have had sudden doubts about your credibility. Of course, some customers may not have been ready to buy, have been too busy, or have been doing a spot of price comparison shopping. In these cases, a discount coupon may encourage the customer to complete the transaction.

Hubspot suggest that 20% of cart abandoners return and purchase after retargeting.

SendOwl's cart abandonment feature helps you recover lost sales, whether you have a customer's email or not.

7. Make more money on each sale

Although upsells probably won't increase your conversion rate, they do mean that you can earn more on each sale without extra marketing spend. Pre-checkout and post-payment upsells work on the basis that it is easier to sell to existing customers (or nearly customers) than it is to complete strangers. According to the book Marketing Metrics:

The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%. The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%.

We launched one-click upsells in 2016 and have been getting some encouraging feedback from sellers about how much extra money they are making. Read our blog post: Do one-click upsells make you more money?

Maximize your checkout value with upsells

Conclusion

As most sellers will admit, getting customers to their website in the first place is the really hard part. So, making sure that as many of them as possible make it through your sales funnel is one of the easiest ways to improve your bottom line, without tearing your hair out or spending a fortune on marketing.

In our last conversion article, we looked at getting customers to press the 'buy now' or 'add to cart' button. In this article we've concentrated on encouraging customers to make it through your checkout process. We really hope that these tips and advice will help you increase your conversion rate, after a bit of testing and experimentation.

Next steps

If you're already selling or nearly ready to launch, why not take SendOwl for a test drive? We offer a 30 day free trial (no credit card needed). We can also help you move from a competitor. See pricing and free trial or features.

If you're still planning your digital product, why not read The definitive guide to selling digital products? We cover all the topics you need to know about, including:

Why sell digital products online?
What digital products can you sell online?
- Make money from something you're doing anyway or want to do
Do I need to sell through a third party marketplace like Amazon or iTunes?
- Sell both direct and through a marketplace
- Even major music studios are getting in on the act
- Advantages of selling direct
- Challenges of selling direct
- Can I really make more money selling products direct?
I'm going to create a digital product and sell direct: now what?
- Choose a payment gateway
What does a digital delivery company do?
- Providing a checkout
- Securely deliver your digital file
What price should I charge for my digital product?
- We do our best to answer the pricing question!
How do I market my product?
- Start early
- Ask for feedback
- Consider getting other people to sell your product for you
- Don't forget your pre-launch email sequence
- Don't forget no-spend marketing options
How can I improve my conversion rate and increase revenue?
What about theft, fraud and hacking?
I've got one of two products doing well – but how can I turn this into a business?
Checklist for selling digital products

Enjoy!

Post Checkout one-click upsells

2015-03-10T00:00:00Z

Last week we launched pre-checkout one-click upsells and within 24 hours sellers were making extra money as a result. This week we're launching one-click post-payment upsells, which should provide you with more great results.

Post-payment upsells are a great way of encouraging people who have just given you money to give you a little bit more. Your customers don't even have to re-enter payment details – all they need to do is press one button and bingo, they have just bought more of your awesome digital products.

Update: We analysed our data to find out how much extra our sellers are making on upsells. See our blog post for the results.

We can't offer this feature to Shopify customers because we don't provide your checkout – see Shopify upsell apps instead

Why should you use upsells and cross-sells?

"So far though 2 upsells in one day that we wouldn't have had before!" Darren E. Cowley

We've had plenty of similar stories coming into the support queue since we launched pre-checkout one-click upsells last week. Upsells are a great way of making more money on each sale without extra marketing spend.

Now we've gone one step further with one-click post-payment upsells.

What are post-payment upsells?

Rather than offering your customers an upsell before they've entered their payment details, you do it afterwards, before they've reached the download page. They work in the same way as pre-checkout upsells and look exactly the same:

It's too early to say based on statistics, but you should see a higher conversion rate with post-payment upsells. This is because there's less friction at this stage due to the buyer having already entered their payment details. They don't need to enter their payment details again. They've also already paid so there's no disruption to the original sales funnel.

Last week we launched one-click pre-checkout upsells and within 24 hours sellers were making extra money as a result.

To configure post-payment upsells create an upsell and choose the "After payment" option. It's really as simple as that - all the other options are the same as pre-checkout upsells.

Conclusion

One-click upsells are a fantastic way to increase the amount you make on every sale without needing to invest any more time or energy in the process – and SendOwl is one of the only ecommerce platforms for digital products around to offer this neat feature.

If you aren't already a SendOwl seller why not join us and give your business a boost?

We launch one-click upsells

2015-02-17T00:00:00Z

Attention Shopify customers! We can't offer this feature to you because we don't provide your checkout – see the Shopify upsell app instead

One-click upsells and cross-sells are a great way of encouraging people already deep in your sales funnel to buy more of your stuff. They allow you to increase the amount of every sale without having to invest any more time and energy in the process. Wohoot! This feature has understandably been much requested. So, here it is, with plenty of options for customisation so you can offer customers a higher value replacement product, an additional product or two, or discount other relevant digital creations.

Update: post-payment one-click upsells are also now available

Why you should use one-click upsells and cross-sells

Well, you can potentially increase the amount of every sale by simply selecting a few options in your SendOwl account. And the rewards can be impressive. We'll be monitoring our own figures to let you know what our sellers are achieving (update: available here).

The main psychology behind upsells and cross sells is that it's easier to sell to existing customers rather than new ones. In the book Marketing Metrics, the authors conclude:

The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%. The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%.

And although pre-checkout customers are not quite existing customers, they have said 'I like your stuff enough to select the Buy Now button', which is more than all those other people floating around the Internet.

What is the difference between upselling and cross-selling?

Upsells and cross-sells target people in slightly different ways. Upsells show people something more expensive and say 'why not have this instead?' This appeals to people who may have missed this option on your website, or who thought it was too pricey initially but now think 'what the heck! Why not!' because they have mentally committed to spending money and adding a few extra $ to an electronic sale doesn't feel like that big a deal.

You can also supercharge your upsell option by offering people a higher value product but with a bit of a discount. Sales legend Jeffery Gitomer summarises this point, speaking from a customer point of view: “When it comes to up-selling, tell me how I win. When I win, you win.” If you offer people an upsell plus discount then you are presenting them with a potential 'win' situation.

Cross-sells, in contrast, are about getting your customers to buy something else rather than something more expensive. This appeals to people who haven't thought things through (they really need one piece of software to make another work effectively), who would be interested in something related and would consider buying it sooner rather than later (the second ebook in a series, for example), or who can be moved by peer pressure (so you say: 'other customers have also enjoyed this cape crochet pattern – limited edition only!'). Again, adding a discount into the mix might help: so you could offer customers a bundle of goods at a discounted price for the lot.

For the purposes of this post, I’m going to use the terms upsells and cross-sells interchangeably though.

Best practice for upselling

One-click upsells add an extra step to your checkout process; occasionally, customers might also feel frustrated that you are 'getting in the way' of them making a purchase. This is something you might want to keep an eye on, because upsells and cross-sells should increase your overall profitability rather than boosting one aspect only to negatively affect another.

We've done what we can to make sure that you benefit from our new feature – our checkout is very straightforward already, it's mobile optimised and our page load time is very quick. One extra screen really shouldn't make too much of a difference. We've also kept the button copy polite and simple (yes please; no thanks) to keep people moving through your sales funnel, preferably in a good mood.

Do keep your upsells as relevant as possible to your customers though. If they can't see a potential 'win' in what you're offering then they have good reason to start feeling a bit narked ('why should I want an ebook on making garden gnomes? I want to buy an ebook on making tables so my partner will quit hassling me about our three-legged table!')

Upsells and cross-sells allow you to increase the amount of every sale without having to invest in extra marketing activities

For an interesting take on upselling best practice, read Len Markidan's post How to Use Upselling to Increase Customer Happiness, Retention and Revenue".

What you can do with SendOwl one-click upsells

Set up an upsell for each of your digital products so they are as relevant as possible to your customers
Ask a customer if they want to buy a more expensive product instead of the one they have in their basket
Ask a customer if they want to buy more preferably related products
Ask a customer if they want to buy a higher value product or an extra product at a discount
Add pictures of your upsell products so customers are more likely to convert
Use HTML to add videos of your product so customers are more likely to convert
Measure how much extra income you are making from upsells

We think this is a real game changer for SendOwl sellers and we're really excited to see how much extra income gets generated as a result.

Conclusion

Used sensibly, upsells and cross-sell are a fantastic way to increase the amount you make on each sale without needing to invest any more time or energy in the process – and SendOwl is one of the only ecommerce platforms for digital products around to offer this neat feature. If you aren't already a SendOwl seller why not join us and give your business a boost?

Thanks to Christopher Sutton of Easy Ear Training for providing the screenshots.

Learn How to Improve Your Conversion Rate: Part I

2015-02-17T00:00:00Z

Your conversion rate, generally speaking, is a measure of how many people who visit your site end up buying your digital product. So, if you increase your site conversion rate you will make more money and get better value from your marketing activities. Making changes to your website that will improve your conversion rate seems like an obvious step for any online business owner. However, it's not always easy to do. How exactly can you improve your conversion rate in the first place? And what conversion rate should you aim for? In this post, we'll look at 5 tips that will help you quickly optimise your website. We hope they help!

Update: Our second conversion rate article, on maximising the number of people who make it through your checkout can be found here

What is a good conversion rate?

Across the internet as a whole the conversion rates for ecommerce sites is between 1% and 2.5% depending on customers types and a number of other factors. Amazon, who have a well known brand and extremely optimised experience, have an 8% conversion rate.

If you're a SendOwl customer and would like to see your overall conversion rate (the percentage of people visiting your site that end up buying), simply plug in your Google Analytics ID to your SendOwl account.

Across the internet as a whole the conversion rates for ecommerce sites is between 1% and 2.5%

How can I improve my conversion rate?

In this post, we're going to look at how you can get more site visitors to press the 'buy now' button, thus making up for all the blood, sweat and tears you spent getting them to your site in the first place. Your pre-checkout conversion rate depends on lots of different factors such as whether your customers understand what you are selling and how it will solve a problem for them; whether they trust your brand; and whether the performance of your website is good enough to keep them on your site in the first place. We'll start by looking at how your content affects your conversion rate, before moving on to some more technical factors.

Tip number 1: make sure people know why they should buy your product

First off, make sure your site visitors are clear about what your product is and how it will solve one (or more than one) of their problems.

1. Have a clear value proposition

This should be at the top of your page, telling a customer what your product does and why they should buy from you and not a competitor. Here are some of our favourites:

Shopify tell you what they do, why they are different (scale & scope), who uses them, and that you can try them out – not bad!

Mad Mimi tells you what they do, why they are different (easy to use, personality), and lets you know you can contact them very easily. Great!

Dropbox keep it simple forcing you to focus on their words which very succinctly describes what they do

For more advice check out Help Scout's article about The Art of Creating a Magnetic Value Proposition

Don't forget that you can always test different value propositions to see which resonate best with customers. A/B testing lets you show two (or more different) versions to random website visitors to see which works best. If testing is new to you, KISSmetrics have a great beginner's guide to a/b testing.

2. Have a clear roll-call of benefits

Tell people how your product will benefit them – don't just list features. For example, one of the benefits of meditation platform Headspace is that you don't have to be in a heath studio or locked away in your living room – you can use their app to meditate on the move. So, instead of saying: 'Wohoo! we have a free app!', they say this:

Headspace show you their key benefits in easily digestible chunks

Make sure your key benefits are easy for readers to see – so either consider bullet points, or chunk them up into one or two sentence paragraphs like Headspace. Avoid saying too much or crushing all your benefits together so people skim them or, worse still, don't read them at all.

Tip number 2: Use video or images to bolster your story

Beautiful images and/or videos of your product will position it in the best possible light and boost conversion considerably. It's no coincidence that all the major retailers post lots of images of their products.

However, videos and images should show what your product does, how it works in context, or show how a buyer wants to feel (happy! successful! Less cheesed off by project overruns!). They shouldn't just be frivolous window dressing or obscure genuinely useful content.

For example, if you are selling an app it could be a good idea to show an image or animation of your product on a mobile or tablet to quickly help people make that connection. This is an approach taken by SwiftKey, an app that helps you type faster on a mobile or tablet:

You can see at a glance that SwiftKey is designed for use on your mobile

Avoid stock photos that don't have any real relationship to your product or brand – they may make people think your site is less credible and can also look a bit cheesy (anyone for another picture of smiling people running down a beach?).

Tip number 3: Make sure your website doesn't contain either distractions or important omissions that stop people buying

Avoid too much/too little content

It can be really tempting to put everything you think a site visitor needs to see on your homepage or a key landing page, but resist. A page that is too cluttered is hard to read and can confuse and bore people.

Of course, what is 'cluttered' for one person may be okay for another. A designer might be horrified by a site that someone else thinks is fine. The main test is to make sure that a site visitor can easily read, see and view all your useful, usable content without need to squint or to spend precious time asking: 'where do I look first?'

Your site visitors want to find the answers to key questions on your website. Don't make them hunt for it! [photo credit]

This problem of too much irrelevant copy is a hundred times worse on small screens. If your customers struggled to find what they wanted on a desktop, then they are going to be so much more frustrated scrolling, pinching or zooming on a mobile.

Instead of content dumping, give people what they need when they need it. So, when they first arrive on your site there is not much point shouting BUY NOW because they don't know much about your product and actually want to check out some key benefits first. Equally, writing about your company ethos might be important to you, but it's probably not the first thing on a customer's mind when they arrive at your site.

Jared Spool, CEO of User Interface Engineering, often writes about 'the scent of information', meaning that if you give your customers a clear idea of what they'll find when they take an action they are more likely to move deeper into your website. That way you can ease people through your sales funnel without needing to create a log-jam of content up front.

If you have trouble containing your zeal for long paragraphs, experiment with writing your content for mobile first. Not only will you end up with content that works cross-platform, but you'll probably end up with more relevant content full stop. A lot of content we upload to websites 'because we can' probably shouldn't be there.

Use social proof

A lack of credibility can damage your conversion rate because people don't trust your brand or your product enough to make a purchase

Although too much badly structured information is a fairly common problem for lower-converting websites, the opposite can also be true. Some websites have important omissions that stop people moving forwards through the sales funnel. One of the most important of these is a lack of faith in your brand and your product. Put simply, you just don't look credible enough to tempt a site visitor to buy.

To boost your online credibility, consider adding (genuine) testimonials from happy customers, preferably with photos and names, publications you've been featured in, information about the specialists behind your product, or endorsement by key influencers or organisations. Professional design and content should also boost the credibility of your site, although only if they communicate your brand. Badly designed sites with obviously sincere people behind them can still outperform WordPress sites that look like everyone else's!

Show don't tell

This is an old writers' maxim. It means that instead of writing 'he felt happy', which leaves a reader cold, you should write something like 'his mouth curved into a smile. Then he punched the air with his fist and shouted 'come on!', which does a much better job of communicating happiness.

In the context of selling digital goods online, show don't tell means that instead of saying to customers, for example, that your product is 'fabulously easy to use' you show them this – perhaps by a demo of your interface or by using screenshots. Or instead of saying 'this is the best product you will ever buy' you can give people a free trial or access to a limited aspect of the product so they can find this out for themselves – and get hooked.

By showing people what your product is like (fab, easy to use), you also boost the credibility of your product because you aren't making airy claims that will make many buyers say 'yeah, right. Anyone can say that!'

Don't just tell your site visitors something – they might not believe you! Show them instead. [photo credit]

Pre-empt objections

Although this is something we'll look at more in our second conversion rate article, there are a few pre-checkout tips that should help boost your conversion rate. Some people will want to know:

'How do I contact you if I want to know something else or ask a question?' Give them an easy and obvious way to do this, like Mad Mimi.
'What happens if something goes wrong with the product?' Make sure people know you offer customer support/a free refund/a 30 day free trial.

Tip number 4: Make sure your calls to action are obvious enough

Calls to action are what you want people to do – and your most important one is 'buy now' or 'add to cart'. Make sure these are easy for people to see and select. Unless you optimise your site for mobiles, you may end up with Buy Now buttons that are barely big enough for a customer to see let alone get a big finger on.

It's also a good idea to make sure that all your call to action buttons are big, clear and in a different colour to your main website colours so they stand out. Notice how nearly all the sites shown earlier use this to great affect.

Tip number 5: Make sure your website looks good on mobiles

Mobile now accounts for 50.3% of all ecommerce traffic – Shopify

More than half of your customers want to buy your products on a mobile, whether they are on their lunch break, watching TV on the sofa, or reduced to mobile browsing because the kids are hogging the laptop.

If your website is responsive – which means it resizes to look good on different screen sizes – then you make it much more likely that they will consider buying your product. However, if your site visitors have to pinch and zoom to see anything on your website then they might not bother. Why should they? Their time is precious and your competitors' websites are much easier to browse.

A recent report on mobile behaviour found that 91% of customers say access to content any way they want is important.

The trick is to stop thinking of your website as a series of pages on which you can precisely arrange your content and start thinking of it as a fluid package of content pieces that will look different on different devices. Just make sure that you establish what content chunks need to appear in roughly what order to most effectively lead your customer through your sales funnel.

But how do you make your site responsive? If you are using a website builder then it's likely they have responsive templates you can use; If you employ an agency or developer, you might need to consider a full or partial redesign. If you go down this route, make sure that all your copy and visuals will work on mobile as well (that 1,000 word about us page might need a rethink!).

This is how the checkout for SendOwl looks on a mobile. We wanted to make sure it was as easy to use as possible.

Tip number 6: make sure your website loads quickly

According to KISSmetrics, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less and a 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. At SendOwl we know how important this is and our average request time is under 0.1s. It's a metric we watch very carefully.

Google also gives fast sites a better search engine position so it's something worth spending time looking at. Here are a few suggestions for reducing page load times:

1. Minimise http requests

An http request is made for different elements on your page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash and so on. So, the more components you have on a page the more likely it is to take a long time to load.

Your easiest option here is to streamline the number of components on your page (do you really need those images? Or that 'cute' animation?). A lean page is a faster page.

Also, consider whether you can use css instead of images, combine multiple stylesheets and reduce scripts and put them at the bottom of the page (if all this is gobbledygook, ask a developer for help or learn a bit about coding – you won't regret it!).

If you don't know how long your web pages are taking to load you should be able to check your analytics. If you use Google Analytics, go to behavior > site speed > speed suggestions for some custom tips about improving the load time of specific pages.

2. Optimise images

KISSmetrics has two tips for reducing image size.

Optimize Your Images – In Photoshop or Fireworks, you can use the “Save for Web” option to drastically reduce image size. An image quality slider lets you see the visual trade-offs between graphic file size and crispness. Don’t have a graphics program? Smush.it from Yahoo can do the trick.

Don’t Rely on HTML to Resize Images – HTML (and by extension, WordPress blogs), make it easy to create a smaller version of a larger graphic. But just because you load that smaller size, doesn’t mean it’s taking up any less room on the server. The browser still has to load the ENTIRE image, THEN check the width and height you want and THEN resize it accordingly.

3. Sort out messy code

Code can be messy for a number of reasons: your developer (which might be you) is not an expert; you use a website build service which sometimes churns out messy code; or your site has been continuously developed, tweaked and extended so your code base is a bit confused. Here’s Google’s recommendations for improving your code base:

To minify HTML, you can use PageSpeed Insights Chrome Extension to generate an optimized version of your HTML code. Run the analysis against your HTML page and browse to the ‘Minify HTML’ rule. Click on ‘See optimized content’ to get the optimized HTML code.

To minify CSS, you can try YUI Compressor and cssmin.js.

To minify JavaScript, try the Closure Compiler, JSMin or the YUI Compressor. You can create a build process that uses these tools to minify and rename the development files and save them to a production directory.

Conclusion

Relatively small changes to your conversion rate can lead to a substantial increase in revenue over time, so it's definitely worth spending some time and money on optimisation now. Conversion rate optimisation is also a great way to stay in touch with what your customers want, because good content addresses user need rather than just business need (and unless you satisfy the former, you won't have much success with the latter).

If you're feeling a bit intimidated by the technical details or the idea of reworking lots of content, step back and take a deep breath. Even small changes can make a difference so just identify what your weakest point is and tackle it. Then start over with the process next week – or perhaps the week after. The upward trend of your conversion rate will be encouragement enough to keep going!

Read part two of our conversion rate series: Getting more people through checkout.

We now offer PayPal Express

2015-02-02T00:00:00Z

PayPal Express is another way of integrating PayPal that provides a more modern checkout flow. It's available to account holders who have a PayPal premier or business account. Like standard checkout, there's no monthly fee; you just pay per transaction.

Whereas with PayPal's standard checkout payment takes place on the PayPal site, with Express checkout the buyer is redirected back to SendOwl to confirm payment. This means we can give buyers access to their downloads faster.

How does the PayPal Express checkout flow look?

The buyer is redirect to PayPal's login page as they are with standard checkout (although the page has a more modern design):

On the next screen they confirm their details:

They are then returned to SendOwl where they confirm payment:

The buyer is then redirected to whichever post-order page is most relevant – the download page, order completion page, external URL, and so on.

Advantages of PayPal Express

Buyers can always download their products faster

The standard PayPal buyer experience means that it's really easy for buyers to miss the download button. This is due to poor design by PayPal. In such circumstances the buyer has to check their email to get access to their download. With PayPal Express, buyers are returned to our site so they always end up at the download page straight after payment.

Buyers can change their order confirmation email

People often open a PayPal account and don't update their associated email address if they change it. This leads to them having an inaccessible email associated with their account, which is where SendOwl sends the order confirmation by default. With PayPal Express the buyer can change their email and have their order confirmation sent elsewhere. This is a much requested feature.

Buyers using mobiles have a much better experience

PayPal Express is much more user friendly and performs better on mobiles and tablets. Considering that mobile now accounts for 50.3% of all ecommerce traffic, this is pretty important.

Fraudsters are easier to spot

Because we know all the buyer's details before we accept payment, it is easier for us to prevent fraud, as well as to implement your fraud/regional filtering settings.

Something else that's currently top secret

One of our main reasons for implementing PayPal Express was so we could support an upcoming feature we're working on right now. We won't give away details just yet but it should all become clear in the next month...

Setting up PapPal Express

Setting up PayPal Express is a breeze. Simply head to the Settings section and then Payment Gateways. Under the PayPal section you just need to check the PayPal Express checkbox and enter your API keys if you haven't already:

Help on entering your API keys can be found in our knowledge base article if you need that.

Wrapping up

We're really pleased to be offering PayPal Express integration because it means a better checkout experience for your buyers and that can only be a good thing for you. PayPal claim a 31% increase in conversion rate when using PayPal Express. We don't think it'll be that high, but we'll take a look in a month's time and publish the rate we see.

Fraud/Regional filtering now available

2014-12-31T00:00:00Z

Attention Shopify customers! We can't make this feature available to you, no matter how much we'd like to. It's up to Shopify to help you out here. You can download their free fraud filter app or install the app Subuno, which integrates well with SendOwl.

Fraud/country filtering is now available in SendOwl. On the back of the new EU VAT functionality we introduced last month, we had a lot of requests to turn off selling to EU countries (other than your own one; or to the EU completely for non-eu sellers). This is completely understandable - the new VAT rules add a burden to doing business and if sales are quite low to EU countries, it can be easier to just stop sales completely. So, we came back early from our holidays to sort this out for you. If you wish to express your gratitude then expressions of undying love, bottles of gin or simply your continued support during this year would all be grand.

Why might you want to use fraud/country filtering? We can think of a few reasons:

Avoid #VATMESS by blocking sales to the EU or to countries other than your own
Only sell to your own country to minimise bureaucracy
Stop credit card fraud from a specific country
Stop individuals who pose a security risk

Setting up fraud/country filters

If you head to Settings you'll see a new Fraud section under Gateway and Taxes section. Here you can add fraud/filtering rules based on where your buyer lives, on their email address, or on their IP address.

There are two ways to use these filters. You can either decide to automatically block specific buyers, or you can be notified when they try to buy your product and then decide yourself whether to let the buyer complete the purchase. Blocking is easy and automatic once you've set up the filters. Notifications mean you have more control over who you sell to, but it takes up more of your time because you have to respond to every notification.

Enabling blocking

Block by country or region

You can block countries or entire regions such as the EU. You can also choose to block buyers from all other countries in the EU country except your own. This is so you can avoid the #VATMESS. If you have the EU VAT setting enabled, then buyers will be blocked based on whether they are located in the EU as determined by EU rules rather than their self-declared country (see our in-depth article on the EU VAT rules for more information on these enthralling rules).

Block by IP address

An IP address is basically an identification number that every computer has (although it isn't quite that simple). You can choose to block individual IP addresses or to block a range of them. IP blocking is useful if there is a network that is causing you problems, for example, compromised servers or people using VPNs.

Block by email

When you enable email blocking, we'll block people by their given email or by their PayPal email. You can block individual emails or a 'pattern' of emails, for example, you could block all people with a hotmail address. This option is good if you're having problems with specific people or groups of people who pose a security/fraud risk.

Limitations of blocking

We've done our best, but there are a few flies in the ointment when it comes to making fraud/country filtering work perfectly. If you're using standard PayPal integration we only get buyer details after payment. So, for example, if you only want to sell to people in Britain then someone in France can still 'buy' your product via PayPal – and we only find out after the transaction is complete.

What we'll do at this stage is refund them automatically. This is fine is they have entered their API key. If they haven't, we'll have to notify you so you can sort out a manual refund. We don't expect this to happen very often though. If you want to avoid this issue cropping up at all, you could consider using PayPal Express (free to business and premier customers) or entering your PayPal API keys so we can automatically refund them.

We also run into trouble if the buyer's location is determined by the country in which their bank is based – we get this information after payment has been processed. In this case, we'll also refund immediately if we can.

So, in short, fraud/country filtering should work very well in the vast majority of cases. However, there might be the occasional problem, most of which we deal with automatically.

What happens to buyers who are blocked?

They see a generic message about the sellers setup. We intentionally don't give away too much information because we don't want to encourage people to try and game the system. If you've blocked someone because of the #VATMESS you are of course able to send a follow up email explaining the situation and being rude about the EU.

Enabling notifications instead of blocking

This option gives you – the seller – an opportunity to decide whether you want to be notified when someone from a specific country/region, or with a certain email address or IP address, tries to buy your digital product.

So, if you choose to be notified when anyone with a hotmail address tries to make a purchase, an order from misstrixie303@hotmail.com, for example, would proceed normally and payment would be taken, but the buyer wouldn't be given access to the download page.

Instead, misstrixie303 sees a screen saying that the transaction needs to be reviewed by the merchant for fraud purposes. Meanwhile, you, the seller, are notified of the transaction and need to decide whether to allow the buyer to access the download or to give them a refund.

Notifications offer you more control over fraud/country filtering than simply blocking people, although it does require you to make decisions on a case-by-case basis rather than set this up to happen automatically. However, you'll only be notified about transactions that match the filters you've set up – you won't have to decide about every purchase!

What about subscriptions: do you check every payment?

Nope. We'll apply the filters you set up the first time they sign up, but we won't check subsequent payments. Obviously if they've got through the first time then they'll get through each subsequent time, and if they've become a problem you will have cut them off since then.

Inspiring last word

We hope this feature makes your life a bit easier, although we realise it's not the most fun feature we've rolled out. However, needs must when there are criminally-minded people trying to defraud you and the EU making your life as difficult as possible. Let us know what you think of this new feature @sendowlhq.

We answer your questions on the new EU VAT rules

2014-12-16T00:00:00Z

Our blog post on the new EU VAT rules has proved very popular and there's been lots of questions via social media, in the blog post comments and of course via support. We've pulled out some of the more common ones and posted them below along with answers.

Impressed with @SendOwlHQ's post about #VATMOSS https://t.co/QGQQxmFtBH SendOwl could be a good solution for many people.
— Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) December 5, 2014

Massive thank you to @SendOwlHQ for doing such an awesome job handling the #vatmoss mess. Respect!
— Cucumber (@cucumberbdd) December 8, 2014

Just come across @SendOwlHQ which could be useful for those of you wondering how to cope with VAT MOSS https://t.co/nuPbMQdaBy
— Chris Maslin (@Chris_Maslin) December 9, 2014

Note: this is a blog post on questions asked after our new 2015 EU VAT rules blog post. If you've not read that we recommend doing that first.

Update: The EU has announced they plan to introduce a threshold. This is currently planned for 2016 although not yet passed into law. See this blog post for more.

What if the customer just lies about where they are located?

If a customer uses a VPN to get an IP address outside their country, and self-certifies this country during checkout, then that will provide a match, and the customer may have avoided tax. In such cases, the EU clarifies "As a rule, businesses should not be held liable for misuse or abuse by their customers" (section 9.5.8).

Do I have to register for VAT if I'm not already registered?

A spokesman for HMRC announced: "Businesses below the current VAT registration threshold that can separate their sales to UK customers from sales to EU customers can voluntarily register the cross border element of their business, and then use that registration number to register for MOSS. This means that their domestic sales will remain VAT free." SendOwl makes it possible for you to separate your sales in this way. In January, we'll also be implementing a new feature that makes it possible for you to only sell to certain countries: so you can avoid selling to customers in Europe should you wish to.

Why do you ask the buyer to self-certify their country rather than just asking for their address?

First, it involves fewer fields so keeps the checkout process efficient (all most buyers have to do is press continue because we pre-select their country). Second, it seems that an address provided for an electronic order may not count because it's not verifiable as discussed in section 9.5.2 of our favourite document.

If I'm packaging several types of goods together (a SendOwl bundle), what classification of goods should I use?

This is covered in section 1.10 of this gov.uk article: "So if you make a supply of a physical product which is ‘bundled’ with a product that is accessed digitally (for example), then the place of supply rule changes will only apply to the digital element of the supply if this is seen as a supply or the dominant part of the bundle."

What's your view on the law?

The idea of stopping huge corporations dodging tax is fine as far as we're concerned. However, the implementation of these new VAT rules seems like it was dreamt up by a bureaucrat who has little idea of how the Internet works. Maybe they have PAs who use the Internet thingy for them?

How does the EU plan to enforce the new EU VAT rules, particularly if If I'm not resident in the EU?

We have no idea

What happens if I email the customer manually with an attachment?

HMRC clarified in a series of tweets that in this instance tax would be decided based on the location of the supplier of the digital products, rather than on the buyer's location. Of course, if you sell more than one a day of your digital products or your files are bigger than a few megabytes this isn't very practical. It is also just a tad regressive! [update: HMRC have now responded with a table clarifying this]

Does it matter that SendOwl is EU-based?

Not at all. All ecommerce transactions for digital goods, regardless of where they are processed or sold from, are affected by the new EU VAT rules. This is because the rate of tax has to be charged at the buyer's location.

What happens if there is a tax rate change when I have active subscriptions?

If you're processing subscriptions with Stripe then we will handle this for you and charge the correct amount of tax when the tax rate changes. Unfortunately, we can't alter the amount charged if you use PayPal because the subscription amount is fixed at the start of the subscription.

What if I'm unsure about the buyer's location and can't get definite evidence?

The EU writes: "In cases of doubt priority should be given to the place that best ensures taxation at the place of actual consumption of the services supplied". This is admittedly a tricky one.

What's the likelihood of a) the bank and the address matching, but this is different to the country the buyer selected during checkout and b) all the bits of evidence are different?

Our initial analysis shows this happens in 0.18% of cases. See our previous post on the EU VAT rules for more information on these two scenarios.

I'm using Shopify - how does this affect me?

As Shopify manages the Checkout and processes the payment you need to configure this option in Shopify not SendOwl. Details can be found on the Shopify website

Wrap up

We do hope this little Q&A has been useful. Let us know if you have any more questions via social media, or in the comments below and we'll do our best to answer.

Maximise your Christmas sales with our winning formula

2014-12-09T00:00:00Z

Do people buy more digital products during the Christmas period? If so, when exactly do they buy? If you only knew the answers to these questions, you could sort out a total kick-ass marketing plan for your digital products. So, to help you out, we crunched data from 2013 to see what useful trends we could spot.

Collecting the data

To start with, we took all our data from 9th December to 2nd January and plotted it against the average sales data from a week early in November in 2013 (which we checked to be an average one). We chose the 9th December as a start date because this was the day when we noticed a divergence from the usual data trend. We chose the 2nd January as an end date for a similar reason – people at this point resumed their normal digital product buying habits.

The average sales data is shown in red and we separated out the weekend as usually that's much lower, probably because people spend more time doing family stuff and less time with their eyes glued to a digital device. The Christmas and New Year's sales data is shown in blue. You can see the graph below.

Proof at last – we're all secret last minute shoppers!

The first point that struck me about the graph was that there was a really big spike in the last few days leading up to Christmas. This was intensely satisfying – I clearly wasn't the only person who put off Christmas shopping before panicking last minute. At least, this was my theory.

It's not really possible to know exactly what someone is thinking at the time they arrive on one of our sellers' sites and purchase a product. However, for the sales to hit 2.5x on 24th December does suggest that the festive season is directly responsible for people buying more digital products.

Watch out for the sales dip – and don't be discouraged

What I wasn't really expecting, was the mid-December sales dip. Even taking into account the usual weekend blip, it stood out. However, it seems fairly easy to explain (using a bit of imagination).

Early to mid-December you're hitting the shops looking for Christmas presents and are still fairly confident that it will all turn out okay. This year you'll miraculously stumble across the perfect present for your uncle and annoying younger brother (not that you care too much about him). And if you get to drink some mulled wine then all the better. Christmas is coming. You'll get a holiday from work and get to eat too many minced pies and cake. Wohoot!

Sales start climbing again though – be patient

From the 16th-20th December sales of digital products begin slowly to climb, starting to exceed the average on the 18th December. This makes sense. You've done the office party. You've gone out with your friends. You've tried to find your uncle a present but realised you shouldn't really buy him socks again. And the thought of facing the ravening Christmas hoards is about enticing as putting your head in a bucket of pig swill.

Christmas is coming. And your boss wants you to complete the equivalent of a year's worth of work in the next two days. Aargh. At this point your thoughts turn lovingly to digital products. There's a great choice, they get delivered immediately and, better still, you don't have to leave the house.

Sales dip – but not for long

The slow rise in sales hits a wall at the weekend before Christmas. This is the last push for Christmas high-street shoppers everywhere. It's the last weekend before Christmas. You're off to see the folks very shortly. Your mum will kill you if you forget a present for her sister (again). You still have a to do list a million miles long. You're going to get some of it done if it kills you (it'll be a close thing). Digital product buying can wait because delivery is instantaneous. At least that thought offers some comfort.

Sales explode in the last two days before Christmas

It's Christmas eve and you really need more presents. You've forgotten at least one uncle, one nephew and your best mate (they'll settle for alcohol though). You start getting creative. Maybe you could just hand-make cards like in the good old days? Or buy everyone a charity goat?

But wait! Didn't your uncle say last Easter how much he loved his new Kindle? And your annoying younger brother is totally fixated on getting a prisoner named after him in a new indie video game (come to think of it, that's a great idea). And didn't your grannie say that she needed to find a new crochet pattern for a jacket?

Wohoot! All these products are available for instant digital delivery. All you need to do is write a thoughtful message in their cards (dear uncle, I saw this ebook on the identification, treatment and preservation of garden gnomes and thought of you) and maybe get hold of a complimentary joke present for your little brother – handcuffs would be perfect.

You are so sorted. Time to have another drink of mulled wine.

Sales remain surprising good

Now this surprised me – I was expecting sales to fall back fairly quickly post Christmas. However, this theory wasn't allowing for the fact that people may have Christmas money to spend. Or more time on their hands to browse online. Or they are bored at work. Or they are bored of their relatives. Or they are still in the grip of consumerist fervour and start getting twitchy unless they can buy something.

Sales don't get back to normal until 2nd December when Christmas and New Year is well and truly over – and the reality of a New Year and a depleted bank account begins to bite. It's time to rein in the spending, start that new exercise plan and enjoy what you already have. Unless someone comes along with a New Year's sale offer you can't resist that is...

For more advice on maximising your Christmas sales, including tips on how to make digital products seem more 'festive', see our post: Maximise your Christmas sales with these 5 simple steps.

Takeaway points for selling digital product at Christmas:

Email out 3 times on 10th (build awareness), 17th, and early on the 24th
Don't be discouraged by a mid-December sales dip
Don't email on weekends
Do market your digital products as great Christmas presents – they are!

New EU Vat rules on 1st January 2015

2014-12-05T00:00:00Z

As of January 1st 2015 businesses who sell digital products to European customers will need to charge VAT based on where their customers are based. What does this mean for you? Well, for SendOwl sellers it means, in most cases, that you just need to check one extra checkbox and then we'll do the rest (although sadly we can't submit the quarterly return or pay the VAT for you). In this post, we'll look at what the new regulations mean for you and how we're helping you to comply.

Update: The EU has announced they plan to introduce a threshold in 2019. We've also written a 6 month summary post here

What is the law at the moment?

If you sell to a consumer inside the EU then VAT is charged at the rate of the country where you – the seller – are based.

If you supply to a business that is within the EU, but outside your own country, then the customer must account for the tax through the reverse charge mechanism. We've been supporting this case for a while.

If you are under the VAT threshold in your EU country then you may not be charging your customers VAT at all.

What will the new law be like?

The main change is that instead of VAT being decided based on where you live, it's now decided based on where your customers live (called 'the destination principle'). For example, if you are based in the UK and sell to a customer in Germany, then you will charge the German VAT rate of 19% rather than the UK rate of 20%. This money then goes to the German government rather than the British one.

Is this because SendOwl is based in the UK?

No, it doesn't matter where we're based. The new EU VAT rules will affect all ecommerce systems on the Internet, because what matters is the location of the buyer and seller rather than the location of the ecommerce system.

What products are covered by the new rules?

Basically, nearly all digital products, including ebooks, audio downloads and crochet patterns. Exceptions include anything that involves your personal delivery, like a webinar. However, a recorded webinar isn't exempt because it's delivered digitally.

I'm not registered for VAT – how will it affect me?

It looks like you'll need to register for VAT, even if you're a micro-business selling a few ebooks and an online course. This a a crazy situation and lots of people are understandably not happy about it. It seems that the UK is the worst affected because we have a high VAT threshold (£81,000, 2014) compared to many other EU countries.

If you want more exact information about how these changes affect your business, check with your local tax authority or an accountant.

Update: If you're based in the UK and caught by this, you're no longer required to charge VAT to UK customers as announced here. However you will need to charge VAT for customers in other EU countries.

I am registered for VAT and sell to consumers. How does this affect me?

As previously described, you'll need to charge VAT based on where your customers live. If you sell through SendOwl, we've made this as simple as possible for you: see our section below 'How can SendOwl help me?'.

I am registered for VAT and sell to businesses. How does this affect me?

Theoretically you only need to charge VAT to customers in the EU, rather than businesses, due to the reverse charge mechanism. However, if that business is not VAT registered (because they are under the VAT threshold in their member state), then they are classed as a customer. As Gov.uk says:

"If you supply digital services and your customer doesn’t provide you with a VAT registration number (VRN) then you should treat the supply as B2C. You, as the supplier, may choose to accept alternative evidence of business status although this may not be acceptable for all member states. If a member state does not accept alternative evidence then you will be responsible for VAT in that country if a VRN has not been provided.""

So, for the purpose of this legislation, a business if defined as an entity with a VAT number, rather than, say, the entrepreneurial passion of someone who spots a gap in the market, mortgages their home, drinks too much coffee and dreams of being the next Steve Jobs. And are still under their country's VAT threshold.

What is the new law trying to achieve?

According to Andrew Webb, Senior VAT Policy Manager at HM Revenue & Customs, it is the "final change in a series of changes to embed the idea that with consumption taxes, such as VAT, the place where the tax is paid is the place where the service or goods is enjoyed, consumed or used".

Or, in other words, it's trying to stop companies like Amazon basing themselves in Luxembourg and paying a lower rate of VAT, while actually penalising thousands of small, entrepreneurial businesses.

This all sounds horrible – where's the nearest pub?

We'll have a double gin & tonic, please. However, before you put your boots on, there is a ray of light at the end of the tunnel. Here at SendOwl we've tried very hard to make your New Year slightly happier.

How can SendOwl help me?

We help you find out customer location and charge the correct amount of VAT based on this information. We also store the evidence for you as required by the new rules, and help you report all this data quarterly.

How do we do this?

Well, to work our your buyer's location, the EU kindly provided us with this list to choose from:

The billing address of the customer
The Internet Protocol (IP) address of the device used by the customer
Location of the bank
The country code of SIM card used by the customer
The location of the customer’s fixed land line through which the service is supplied to him
Other commercially relevant information (for example, product coding information which electronically links the sale to a particular jurisdiction)

Realistically, this gives us three options:

IP address
location of the bank
country selected by buyer during checkout [this comes under 'other commercially relevant information')

From those three bits of evidence only two are available at the point of checkout: the country selected by the buyer and the IP address. We use this evidence to automatically charge the buyer the right amount of tax based on their location. So, you don't have to worry about what rate of tax to charge buyers: we track and manage all the EU VAT rates for you.

Once the order is processed, we then receive the location of the buyer's bank. Compiling these three bits of evidence, we end up with four possible cases.

The most likely and best cases

The most likely case is that the country selected by your buyer during checkout and the IP country match. Your buyer has been charged the right amount of tax and we have the two pieces of evidence required. Wohoot!
The country selected by your buyer and the bank country match. Your buyer has been charged the right amount of tax and we have the two pieces of evidence required. Wohoot!

The less likely and more complicated cases

The bank and the address match but this is different to the country the buyer selected during checkout. This is a tricky case. We charged the amount of VAT of the country your buyer selected, as the location of their bank wasn't available at the time of checkout. This means we may have charged the wrong amount of VAT. So, we compare the rate that should have been paid based on the bank location/IP country with that which your buyer actually paid. If the amount due is the same or less then we have the evidence required and the amount of tax paid is correct. Phew! If the amount due is greater than what was paid though, you can email the buyer and ask for more evidence that they are based where they claim to be. This fourth piece of evidence is acceptable and means the amount of VAT charged is correct. Or you can ask them to pay the difference.

This last case could be an issue - will the buyer bother to respond with evidence or pay the extra tax? In such cases we allow you to choose whether to allow transactions to progress to completion automatically or not. Just select this in Settings > Taxes. This may seem a admin headache if it happens but bear in mind the buyer will have had to actively tried to avoid the tax for this case to occur. We'll also be adding support in the future to pro-actively detect this on checkout where bank country information can be available before charging.

All the bits of evidence are different. In which case, we'll assume the buyer is based in the country they selected during checkout. We'll then email you to let you know that you'll need to get hold of another piece of evidence to placate the EU VAT people.

This is less of an issue than the previous case because you have no matching evidence so are making the best guess you can based on all the facts available. Or as the EU puts it: "In cases of doubt priority should be given to the place that best ensures taxation at the place of actual consumption of the services supplied". If you are unable to obtain more evidence we believe the customers self-certified location would be the most reasonable location to go with.

Update: Based on our first weeks of data it seems case 3 occurs in 0.1% of transactions and case 4 in 0.08%. Obviously your exact figures will vary depending on a lot of factors but it gives you an idea of the size of the problem (really quite small).

This sounds good, but why don't you do everything for us like Amazon?

SendOwl provides the technology to enable a transaction. As the buyer pays the seller direct it is the seller who is responsible for taxes.

On the flip side, this means we don't take an enormous cut of your profits, separate you from your customer base, or spend millions of pounds trying to avoid tax, thus prompting the EU to penalise smaller businesses like yours...

How do you set up the new EU VAT feature in SendOwl?

If you have the EU reverse-charge option already enabled then the new EU VAT feature will be automatically turned on for you.

If not, you can turn it on in the Settings and then Taxes sections. If you want to do this now, clear out any tax rules you may have for EU countries and turn the option on. Until the end of the year we'll use your own country tax rate for charging VAT and then, come January 1st 2015, we'll automatically change you over to the new rules. In both cases, we'll use our inbuilt tax rates so you don't need to put in VAT rates yourself.

However, it's your choice whether you have the new EU VAT features on or not. You may want to manage this yourself.

When this option is enabled, your buyer will see a screen in the checkout process that looks like this:

We preselect this to the country we detect from their IP so in most cases they can just hit Continue. This is as streamlined as we can make the whole process for you and your buyer. Not bad, considering that the EU VAT documentation runs to hundred of pages (and we've read pretty much all of it. Scintillating stuff, I tell you). If you already use our reverse-charge feature then this screen will be familiar as you'll already have it in your checkout process.

You don't need to worry about working out what VAT rate to charge your buyers – we do this all for you, including reduced rates for ebooks and audio books in relevant countries. However, we do need to know whether you are selling an ebook or audio book. Just edit your product type in advanced settings. You can also set items an non-vatable:

Storing of evidence

The EU requires the evidence of your buyer's location to be stored for 10 years. We'll take care of this for you. However, any evidence that you have to obtain due to inconsistent data at checkout is your responsibility. This isn't a huge deal though – if you use an email client like Google your content is stored automatically.

Reporting your European sales

To avoid a Sisyphean situation where you have to register and pay VAT in every member state where you have customers, a special scheme has also been introduced called the Mini One Stop Shop (MOSS).

The data of your European sales and the VAT paid is due at the end of each calendar quarter. We will email you at the end of each quarter with details of everything you need to submit to MOSS. We can't say what this will be quite yet, because we haven't access to the reporting system at this stage. However, with some luck the EU will tell us more before March 2015. We can barely contain our excitement.

Update: details available in this blog post

Can I just not sell to EU customers and avoid this mess?

We've had a few emails about this and will be providing this option in late December/early January. Contact support to be notified when this goes live.

Update: this is now available as part of our fraud filtering functionality

A few tweaks for our PayPal customers and anyone who has set up their own tax rules

As a result of these new EU VAT rules, we'll now use the SendOwl tax rules rather than the PayPal ones. If you've been affected by this, we'll have emailed you already.

If you have set up tax rules for EU countries already these will automatically be removed and switched over to our SendOwl tax rules, which encompass all the twists and turns of the new EU VAT rules.

Conclusion

Don't panic! We feel your pain and confusion and we've been working very, very hard to try and make the new EU VAT rules as easy as possible for you and your buyers to comply with. We don't believe you should stop doing what you love because of these rules, or that people in the EU shouldn't be allowed to buy your wonderful products because of them. Together, we can make this work.

We'd love to hear from you about what you think of the new EU VAT changes and our approach (@sendowlhq).

In summary how SendOwl will help you:

SendOwl automatically tracks EU VAT rates and charges the correct amount of tax based on country (including local ebooks and audio books rates)
We'll store the evidence of buyer location for up to ten years as requested by the EU, so you don't have to
We've kept the checkout process as streamlined as possible for your buyers so you won't lose sales because of these new rules
Set up of this new feature is easy – select one checkbox and you're good to go, with the small exception that if you sell ebooks or audio books you'll need to choose your product type in advanced settings
You don't need to read hundreds of pages about EU VAT because we've done it for you
We'll keep you informed about the EU VAT changes, offering lots of helpful advice, statistics as we gather them, and sarcasm when we can't help ourselves.

What we can't do:

Submit quarterly returns and pay your tax
Tip a truck load of banana skins outside the EU parliament and film what happens

Useful resources

Here is the EU commission information, possibly not for the faint hearted!

Here is the EU commission information on the one stop shop (31 page PDF; definitely not for the faint hearted):

Here is the EU commission information on 'Explanatory notes on the EU VAT changes to the place of supply of telecommunications,broadcasting and electronic services that enter into force in 2015' (92 page PDF; probably best to grab a coffee or have a nap first)

Here is a link from the excellent gov.uk site which explains it all in plan English (good work guys!)

Rachel Andrew has also set up a GitHub repo to gather links and stories: http://rachelandrew.github.io/eu-vat/

Let us know if you've come across other useful resources and we'll add them to the list

Top image credit: the wonderful Brent from Brooklyn, New York

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Providing proof of customer location for new EU VAT rules

2014-11-27T00:00:00Z

Update: Our article with implantation details and a full description of the law change is now live. We recommend you read that article rather than this one which was published prior to our functionality going live.

The new EU VAT rules come into force on 1st January 2015: Happy New Year from Brussels! In this post, we'll specifically look at how you can find out where your customers live without having to ask them lots of impertinent questions. If you don't know anything about the EU VAT rules then we'll be posting a long article early next week that explains what's changing, and how we've made it as easy as possible for you to comply.

How do I find out where my customers live?

The new EU legislation stipulates that instead of VAT being decided based on where you live, it's now decided based on where your customers lives. This means you need to find out where your customers live. But how can you do this without asking lots of impertinent questions?

The EU requires two non-contradictory items from this list:

the billing address of the customer
the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the device used by the customer
location of the bank
the country code of SIM card used by the customer
the location of the customer’s fixed land line through which the service is supplied to him
other commercially relevant information (for example, product coding information which electronically links the sale to a particular jurisdiction)

In practical terms, it seems like you need to ask for the customer's address. You're unlikely to get much joy from trying to track down the location of their SIM card or their fixed landline number.

We already let you ask for a customer's address, but it isn't a great option because it will negatively impact your conversion rate. Typically, for every extra piece of information you ask people during the sales funnel, you'll increase cart abandonment. Added to this, people just get confused when you ask for their address when selling a digital product that doesn't need to be posted. They start thinking you're going to flog their information or something equally suspicious.

So, how have we tackled this?

Well, we can get the location of the card from our payment processors, and we already record the IP address. But the EU requires two matching pieces of information and this won't always happen. So, we could require the address during all transactions but, as already discussed, we don't think this is a great plan.

So here's the plan for SendOwl sellers:

We'll record the IP address during the sales as usual
We'll get the registered country of the card once the payment completes via our payment processors
We'll match these – in most cases, this will be the end of the process
If they don't match, we'll drop you an email asking you to get in touch with the buyer and confirm details

It may sound like the last case is going to happen a lot, but when you think through the cases there won't be that many:

Someone is on holiday so their IP address is not where they are usually based
Someone lives abroad but uses a card from another country
Someone has got millions in a secret bank account in Switzerland and doesn't want to pay any tax

We've had a look at the last 1000 orders in our database to get an idea of how frequently this might happen. Of these 31 didn't have matching IP and card details. So, as a rough guess it looks like you'll need to ask for an address in 3% of cases. That said we're deploying a new IP resolution service with this update so we expect that number to fall.

Of course, if you sell products aimed at people on holiday or you are getting too many of these emails, you can require the address during checkout – as the lesser of two evils.

We think our approach is much better than asking everyone for their address during checkout – however, as with all sensitive decisions, we're giving you a few options about how you want to proceed.

What about the rest of the issues to do with the new EU VAT rules?

We've understandably had a lot of questions to support asking about the EU VAT regulations in the last month. Rest assured, we're making it as easy as possible for you to comply with these laws (in fact, just one extra check box to charge the correct VAT rates across the whole of Europe).

We've finished development and are now testing before deploying to the live site. Next week, we'll post a detailed blog post outlining how the new changes affect you and also what we've done to make your New Year very slightly happier.

Maximise your Christmas sales with these 5 simple steps

2014-11-17T00:00:00Z

A recent survey by Shop.org found that the average shopper is planning on spending $932 (£595) this holiday season, with 56% planning to shop online. Make your Christmas a merry one by making the most of this festive shopping spree. Just follow these 5 simple steps and you'll be ho ho ho-ing all the way to the bank.

1. Reach out to customers with gift ideas

Don't wait for customers to come to you. Reach out by email and social media, and connect with your customers when they are desperately thinking: 'what do I get my annoying younger brother' or 'where do I get a DIY shed plan for my dad?'. If you provide people with an answer to these painful Christmas questions and make it easy for them to buy from you, then you'll gain Christmas sales – and perhaps also a loyal customer into the bargain.

Search for people looking for ideas on Twitter using search.twitter.com. You can also check out how other sellers are getting into the Christmas spirit and perhaps pick up some ideas.

To optimise your Christmas email newsletter, take time to get your subject line right. According to one A/B test 'Merry Christmas' has nearly double the conversion rate of 'Happy Holiday'.

However, you'll probably want your subject line to be even more targeted than simply wishing someone a Merry Christmas. If you're running short of ideas, James Burchill has generously provided a list of 36 holiday email subjects that you can use. My favourites are: 'You Don’t Need Elves When You Have Our Gift Guide!' and 'Who Did You Forget This Time?'.

2. Update your website to showcase Christmas offers and give it a Christmas feel

It may still be November and you feel more like Scrooge than the Christmas fairy, but put aside your scruples. Update your website to showcase Christmas gifts, or to offer a Christmas angle on your digital products. If you sell Photoshop effects then this is the perfect Christmas gift for a niece that loves design. Or if you sell a technical ebook, this is a fantastic present for a Kindle-loving father. Be creative in how you market your digital products. Physical gifts of socks, soap and aftershave are so last century!

You might also consider adding a bit of more general festive cheer to your website. Some of your potential customers might still be wondering if a digital product is suitable as a Christmas present. Reassure them by making them feel that your products and Christmas are natural bedfellows. Deck your website banner with mistletoe. Have fun.

Don't forget to do the same in social media. Changing your Facebook Cover Image or Twitter Profile Picture to a more seasonal picture can grab your customer's attention and put them in a festive mood! Spread the joy by adding some mistletoe, a Christmas hat or some fairy lights.

Seasonal is good; having more lights than your nearest airport runway is less good. [photo credit]

Also prioritise information on your website about what devices your digital product works on. Gift buyers will be worried they will buy a product and it won't work on their friend's digital device. If your digital product works across many platform make this clear. It's a selling point.

3. Consider combining a physical gift with your digital product

There will be some customers who don't like the idea of 'just' handing over a digital product on Christmas morning. Fair enough. However, this doesn't mean they won't buy from you. You just need to either give them something tangible to put under the tree or suggest how they can do this themselves.

It may still be November and you feel more like Scrooge than the Christmas fairy, but put aside your scruples. Update your website to showcase Christmas gifts.

Amanda Gagnon suggests: "Printable vouchers are a good idea, but modern technology lets you take this a step further. Provide a customized QR code to print out after purchase. When the recipient unwraps they code, they can scan it with a smartphone to see what they’ve received."

Other ideas include:

Provide a card template that your customers can print out themselves – encourage them to get creative with the type and quality of print paper they use
Suggest physical items your customers can include with their digital gift. If you sell surf videos, then perhaps your buyer could bundle this with a slogan t-shirt?
Encourage your customer to make the gift personal, perhaps by writing a thoughtful message on an accompanying card. Make your customers see that digital presents can be every bit as thoughtful and personal as physical ones.

4. Send Christmas cards to loyal customers

Digital products make great Christmas presents. They don't have to be shipped, delivery is instant, you don't have to go anywhere near a heaving shopping street, and digital products encompass a huge range of products and experiences.

E-Christmas cards are cheap and easy. Physical cards are more expensive but more likely be read.

Whatever type of card you send, try for an appropriate blend of festive cheer and actual goodwill. Your customers can smell insincerity and desperate marketing a mile off. Don't make them wince!

Try and time your cards so you reach customers when they are just passing the 'last posting day before Christmas' date. That way, you'll seem like nice and useful people.

5. Send customers an email on 24th December

Digital products make great Christmas presents. They don't have to be shipped, which means you don't have to worry about them not being delivered on time or when your relative is in. Delivery is instant, so you can order as late as you want. You order online, so you don't have to go anywhere near a heaving shopping street in the town centre. And digital products encompass a huge range of products and experiences. Not everything that people want can be wrapped up and placed under a Christmas tree.

This message will resonate more with certain customer segments than others: more likely with 18-35 year old university educated shoppers, particularly men according to a survey by Elastic Path. It might be worth targeting this particular demographic with emails and adverts. Although, don't write off your other customers. Digital trends are changing all the time. We all know how embarrassing it is having our parents and even grandparents on Facebook!

You don't want to spam customers with too many emails, but this opportunity is too important to resist. You have a captive audience on 24th December – and they have forgotten Uncle Oscar, their mother's brother!

You are going to be their knight in shining armour. Your writing app will help Uncle Oscar finally finish his memoir – and will be delivered in 10 minutes. Your customer's mother will be happy and give them an extra servings of turkey. Wohoot!

Merry Christmas! [photo credit]

By following these six simple steps you will maximise your Christmas sales while helping your customers have a stress-free Christmas. Think of this post as a little holiday gift from us. Merry Christmas!

Shopify responsive checkout

2014-11-13T00:00:00Z

Shopify have introduced an upgraded checkout that's responsive and works well across all devices. This is great news. SendOwl has offered this natively for several years so it's great to see our largest partner is now also supporting mobile and tablet devices. With this step, Shopify digital product sellers can offer a seamless experience on any device right through from ordering to download.

Upgrade your Thank-you page code

As part of this migration Shopify has altered the way the checkout works internally and as such the code you need on your Thank-you page (to link to our download page) has altered slightly.

If you're migrating to the new Shopify checkout you will also need to upgrade your Thank-you page code. To do this head to the Settings section within SendOwl, then Shopify and follow the Setup Guide link. From there copy the Thank-you page code and replace your existing code. This step is optional so you might not have added it before.

If you're not yet moving to the responsive checkout right now you can still go ahead and change the code now - it won't break your existing integration. The other two areas where you can include your download link in Shopify (order email and customer area) are unaffected.

And that's all you need to do to upgrade your checkout experience and increase the conversion rate of your mobile customers.

How to publish an ebook (revised June 2017)

2014-10-23T00:00:00Z

Interested in self-publishing an ebook? Now is a great time to get started! More than eighteen million self-published titles are bought by readers every year. In this guide, the SendOwl team covers everything you need to know about publishing your own ebook, right from researching your initial idea through to formatting your ebook, working out a pre-launch strategy and selling your ebook from your own website.

Part I: Research and begin writing

1. Realise that the idea that's been bugging you is the perfect starting point for an ebook!

You don't need to wait until you think you're the number one expert in the world on a certain subject to write an ebook. If you have been digging into a subject that bugs you and want to share what you've learnt with other people then you're in a great position to share your knowledge and make some money.

Joel Runyon, founder of Impossible, had his first hit with an online fitness programme called Impossible Abs. For one of his blog posts, he did a case study on himself about getting six-pack abs:

"It turns out there's a lot of interest in that. I basically reverse engineered the process I'd followed and then shared it with people in a product. That was one of the first successful products we had."

Sally Jenkinson also started off writing a blog post before realising that she had quite a lot more to say on the subject:

Having started thinking about the concept of documentation more and more due to the work I was doing and the people I was working with, I decided to finally put fingers to keyboard and set out to write a draft blog post whilst on a train one day towards the end of the year. As the content grew, I hesitated every time I referred to “this post” within the text, eventually optimistically changing it to “this article” before I later finally caved and wrote “this book”. It was defined. I was writing a book. The writing continued in a somewhat fragmented way, depending on whether I had space to get my laptop out on trains, and how grumpy I was.

Ann Kullberg, who started off as a struggling portrait artist, discovered that by sharing her knowledge about coloured pencil artwork she could forge a new career as a seller of digital products:

Instead of just thinking of it as art and people liking it, I started thinking about sharing my talent, my techniques and other people's techniques, teaching – and that there's all kinds of ways to make money with art. You just have to have that switch turned on.

So, you don't need to be an expert when you start researching and writing your ebook – just enthusiastic about your subject and able to make it accessible to your readers.

2. Start writing to make sure that you actually like the idea

Don't choose a topic that you think might sell, but which bores you senseless. You'll actively hate the subject within a month and you won't communicate the subject well. Also, most readers will spot if you're just going through the motions.

Work out why you're writing this book and not someone else. If you're writing a factual book, what experience do you have? Or want to share? Aim to become the most accessible authority on a topic rather then the greatest authority, as Sonia Simone suggests in her Copyblogger post: How to Become an Expert on Nearly Any Subject.

Don't choose a topic that you think might sell, but which bores you senseless. You'll actively hate the subject within a month and you won't communicate the subject well.

Drew Neil started writing Practical Vim when he was still learning about the text editor – which has a famously steep learning curve. It was to be the book he wanted to read when he was starting out with Vim. Although other people have written about Vim, Drew combined a strong desire to communicate the subject with an ability to explain difficult concepts in an accessible way. That was his unique selling point. He's now got over 50 five star reviews on Amazon and sales to match.

3. Research your market

Make sure your author name and prospective title are not already taken. If they are, this could lead to confusion further down the line.

If you're writing a factual book, choose a title that shows your readers how they will benefit from reading your ebook. Subtitles can be particularly helpful in clarifying what you can offer a reader. A good example is Tim Ferris's The Four Hour Work Week: escape the 9-5, live anywhere and join the new rich. The main title hooks your interest. Work weeks are usually longer than four hours! The subtitle then clarifies the benefit to a reader: not only will the book show a reader how they can work fewer hours but it will also show them how they can make a lot of money and live where they want. Result!

At this stage, you'll also want to check there is actually a market for your ebook. Do some general searching for the problem your ebook solves to see what comes up. If there are a lot of frustrated people discussing the problem on Quora, Stack Exchange or a forum you're a member of, then you're probably onto a good thing. If your free resources on the subject have gained traction then that's a promising sign that people want information on that subject.

The Internet makes doing research easier than ever, although you can still find inspiration (and information) in some epic libraries [George Peabody Library in Baltimore, USA]

If you already have a following and you can't quite decide what angle to take for your ebook, you could run a survey to ask potential readers what they would prefer, giving them a couple of choices.

If you don't have a following, then a $100 Adwords campaign to test out an idea would be a good investment. This is a great way to test the market, and it's much better to discover there is very little demand for your product at this stage. It's also a useful way to start collecting emails or even pre-orders.

Blogger Daniel Hall recommends doing some quick research on Amazon. He suggests typing in your chosen subject and seeing how the top four books on the subject rank on the best seller list. In his view, under 100,000 is optimal, and less than 500,000 is acceptable. You could also check the reviews to see what people are saying on the subject and whether there are any hints that your approach would be particularly welcomed.

Ryan Buckley, guest posting on the Four Hour Work Week, also offers a detailed overview of how to research the Amazon market in his post: How to (Really) Make $1,000,000 Selling E-Books – Real-World Case Studies.

Effectively researching your market at an early stage will save you heartache later on when there is no demand for your ebook. Equally, it can be very inspiring at this stage to see how many people are looking for exactly the kind of book you intend to write.

4. Plan your ebook

Planning your ebook will save you time because you'll be able to concentrate on what matters and resist digressions. If you're writing a factual book you'll need to work out what you want to include in this ebook, and what you'll save for your next one. If you're writing fiction you'll need to make sure than your narrative has a compelling story arc that keeps a reader hooked.

Experiment with a few techniques to help you work out what to include and what to leave out. You could write a big list, although don't worry at this point about putting it in order. Or if you're a more visual person, construct a mindmap, either on paper or using a tool like bubbl.us. Or you could get really creative like novelist Emma Healey, who came up with an impressive idea to picture the world of her novel:

I drew plans of my protagonist’s house, her daughter’s house, her brother in law’s, and her friends' houses. I also printed out, cut up and glued together images from Google maps to create my own picture of her local area.

Once you've done as much brain storming as you can stomach (or when your friends plead with you to just get on with it), write a content outline. This is where you take your ideas and put them in some kind of order.

A content outline by J.K.Rowling for one of her Harry Potter books

When it comes to writing though, don't feel you need to write your introduction first and then your first chapter. Start with what you're most excited about. This will give you the momentum to write more. The introduction will almost certainly be written last because the scope and content of your book probably will change slightly as you write.

Don't get hung up on the length of your ebook either. There's no hard and fast rule as to how long an ebook should be, although book coach Judy Cullins offers some advice.

Just make sure that your ebook is tightly written. Just because you could write 80,000 words doesn't mean you should!

5. Keep writing

Aim to write little and often rather than waiting until your writing conditions are 'perfect' (coffee, quiet, entire day off, hand-made quill...) which rarely happens.

There are plenty of options out there to help you keep writing. A good one is 75O words, which encourages you to write – yep, you guessed it – 750 words a day.

I've long been inspired by an idea I first learned about in The Artist's Way called morning pages. Morning pages are three pages of writing done every day, typically encouraged to be in "long hand", typically done in the morning, that can be about anything and everything that comes into your head. It's about getting it all out of your head, and is not supposed to be edited or censored in any way.

You get points for keeping on track and a score card at the end of the month.

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. E.L. Doctorow

If you're more time-oriented, then a pomodoro timer might be a good choice. An amusing take on this is the Write or Die app, sold through SendOwl, which offers consequences (or rewards) for writing so many words in a set amount of time. So, for example, if you fail to write 500 words in 40 minutes you might find yourself assaulted by a horrible sound and a picture of a grumpy cat.

If you respond well to peer support, consider joining a writing community like write-track, a 'goal-setting community for writers'. As well as the community aspect, their blog also has some useful posts like How to Build a Regular Writing Habit.

If you have grave concerns about your ability to concentrate when there's so much happening in your inbox or on Twitter, close them all down. And if you can't trust yourself even then, use an app than blocks them and doesn't let you change your mind like SelfControl, which is free and open source. This is a useful round up of other apps that help you maintain focus.

If you still get stuck, try reading the highly commended Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott. As the title suggests this has some great tips for life too.

"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'"

Avoid getting too hung up on editing. At this stage, George Orwell's six rules for writing are a great reference point in terms of how to write:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print
Never use a long word where a short one will do
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out
Never use the passive where you can use the active
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous

Part II: Keep writing and marketing your ebook

6. Start building - or expanding – your online community

Many ebook authors make the mistake of thinking that marketing happens after they've written their book – it doesn't. If you want to sell your ebook online it starts now!

If you haven't already, start building a website or blog. Even if you think you'll mainly sell through Amazon, this is still a really good plan. You'll make a substantial amount more on each sale if you sell through your own website rather than through a middleman who takes a 30%+ cut. You'll also be able to directly connect with your readers, making life much easier when you launch your next ebook or digital product.

With options like WordPress, SquareSpace, Wix and Weebly around you no longer have to employ a design agency (or your overworked brother or sister) to help you out if you're not technical. However, if you can afford to employ professionals to help you with design and copywriting then do. Good design and content will turn more site visitors into customers.

Many ebook authors make the mistake of thinking that marketing happens after they've written their book – it doesn't. It starts now!

If you've not done much marketing before then there are some useful resources online. KISSmetrics offers an accessible free guide to content marketing – although you'll need to part with your email address. We've also put together a Beginners' Guide to Marketing to start you off.

Start talking about subjects that relate to your ebook on social media. Keep an eye out for any news articles, or interesting opinion pieces to share in tweets and posts and don't be afraid to join relevant conversations. This is a great way of getting yourself seen by wider audiences, who are likely to read your biography and see that you're writing an ebook on a subject they are interested in.

You could also sign up with Help a Reporter Out (HARO), which hooks up journalists with experts. As the HARO website says, "Sharing your expertise may land you that big media opportunity you’ve been looking for."

If this all sounds like a lot of work, that's because it is! A good rule of thumb is that you should be spending at least 50% of your ebook schedule on marketing if you want your ebook to sell.

7. Keep writing

If you're getting stuck, or would like a second opinion, consider asking friends or people in your field for advice. You might be surprised how helpful people can be in exchange for a nice thank you, a sneak preview or a free copy.

Andrea Goulet Ford had got her book Culture of Content to beta stage and wanted feedback. She asked on the content strategy LinkedIn group for early-stage reviewers, whose contribution would then be listed in the acknowledgements section. She got 22 replies, which not only secured her valuable peer feedback but also encouraged her to see that there was an enthusiastic audience for her book.

Write wherever works for you [photo credit]

If you want advice on how your book is written, and are willing to pay for it, you might consider approaching a literary consultant. They can provide professional feedback on all aspects of a manuscript, so you can see what's already working and where improvements can be made.

8. Keep marketing

If you've not already, consider whether you can swap content for a reader's email address so you can build up your contact list for when you launch.

Literary consultant Claire Wingfield offers a free 21-day novel writing course as well as a sample of her writing guide in return for a reader's email address. Entrepreneur Sean Fioritto offered an interactive video course all about Flexbox.

Readers might be scared you'll spam them so pay attention to your microcopy. Web developer and blogger Guy Routledge writes:

Spam sucks, so there'll be none of that. I'll never share your details, and you'll never get more than one email per week.

Also, consider how you design your signup form. Karen McGrane and Ethan Marcotte go for a friendly approach which we think works really well:

It's a good idea at this stage to make a list of influencers around your subject so they can help to spread the word about or endorse your ebook. To do this, search for keywords in Twitter that relate to your ebook and switch the search filter to 'People'. Look for anyone with a good amount of followers (over 500) and add them to a list. Over time, start conversations with them and retweet their content. This will help you to form relationships with them, and perhaps you might suggest meeting face to face for a coffee if you have a good rapport with someone.

Guest posting is another good option for building an audience. Dip into The Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging if you're new to the concept. Make sure you're contributing high quality content to reputable sites though. Search engines penalise people who use spammy guest posts to (try to) improve their SEO.

Asking colleagues and potential readers for their feedback on your work in progress is also a great idea. Not only does their feedback help you improve your work, but you'll be pleasantly surprised by how many of them will go on to act as cheerleaders, offering to promote your ebook when it's finished.

If this all sounds like a lot of work, that's because it is! A good rule of thumb is that you should be spending at least 50% of your ebook schedule on marketing if you want your ebook to sell.

9. Finish the first draft!

Hang on, hadn't you better just... no! You want your ebook to be great but be wary of wanting it to be 'perfect'. Michael Hyatt writes in a blog post on The Paradigm Shift That Helped Me Defeat Perfectionism Once and for All that:

Perfection doesn’t take into consideration of the cost, time, or significance of something. It’s just an illusive, unreal, unattainable goal. It’s better to do good work really well. That way you’re contributing to people’s lives, instead of locked in your own head about whether your work measures up to an impossible standard.

Although you won't have an old-school publisher breathing down your neck, you will upset your marketing plan if you keep you readers waiting for too long. Set yourself a deadline and stick to it. Done is better than perfect.

Rachel Andrew was one day off launching her Profitable Side Project Handbook when she realised that the PDF that was being generated was 180MB. Instead of putting off her launch, she got her head down and found a solution.

Part III: Get your book ready for publication

10. Ask a professional or an editor friend to edit and proofread your book

Your book is much less likely to sell well or get good reviews if your structure sags, you've repeated yourself or you've gone off on a diversion when you should have stuck to the point. No matter how many times you edit your book, you will miss problems that will be obvious to someone else. Find these problems now otherwise someone else will point them out in a review.

“Self editing is the path to the dark side. Self editing leads to self delusion, self delusion leads to missed mistakes, missed mistakes lead to bad reviews. Bad reviews are the tools of the dark side.” Eric T. Benoit on Goodreads

There are two types of editing that a professional can help you with:

Substantive or developmental editors may:
- suggest how you can reorder or rewrite sentences to improve clarity and accuracy
- alert you to inconsistencies, repetition and boring bits
- help you adjust your language so it appeals to your target market
Copy-editors may:
- fix errors of spelling, punctuation, capitalisation, grammar and word usage
- rewrite tangles sentences
- check over captions, tables and footnotes
- make sure your ebook conforms to a style guide, if you're using one

Online grammar checking tools like Grammarly are useful, but hardly foolpoof. You could also ask an editor to look at the copy on your website and sales page.

Any errors caught at this stage are a lot easier to change than this rather embarrassing road sign

Proofreading should be done after your ebook has been edited, because mistakes creep in during the editing process. You'll want to look out for typos, spelling mistakes (e.g. 'they're' instead of 'their', 'your' instead of 'you're'), layout issues and incorrect fonts. Also, double check the spelling of any names in your ebook.

'Grammar Girl' Mignon Fogarty's primary advice on avoiding typos is to have someone else proofread your work. She also offers some useful proofreading tips if you're doing it yourself:

Read your work backwards
Read your work out loud
Always proofread a printed version of your work
Give yourself some time

11. Design your cover

You've got a few options here. You can have a go yourself if you've some design talent or want to improve your design skills. Sally Jenkinson took this route:

Just like I know barely anything about typography, I also know extremely little about design. I do however like to try. I have a sense of ownership over things that I make, and I like to use these things as an opportunity to try to get better. I therefore designed the cover and the interior of the book, which is why it probably looks a bit off to anyone who actually does this kind of stuff for a living.

If you're not sure where to find a suitable image for your book cover, check out our post A Beginners' Guide to Finding Images.

Platform 99 designs combines the idea of crowd sourcing and payment: you write a design brief complete with budget, which is then posted in the 99 designs marketplace. Designers will then submit their ideas and you can pick your winner. Other more general freelance marketplaces include UpWork. Search for people with exact skills, such as ebook cover designer, and then check out their previous work.

Alternatively you can pay a professional designer. How do you find a designer though? Smashwords maintains a list of formatters and cover designers.

Or you could try companies that provide ebook authors with design and typesetting support, including damonza.com and authorsupport.com.

12. Format your book

Okay, there are a lot of options here and they are changing all the time! Thankfully, there are some great articles on the subject.

Jonathan Snook offers a good introduction to formatting your ebook in his blog post How to Write a Book. His summary of the pros and cons of the three main formats, epub, mobi and pdf, is particularly useful if you're new to the subject. To quote:

PDFs are supported on almost every device (Windows, Mac, Kindle, iPad, Android, etc.) and can even be a stepping stone to creating a print version of your book. PDFs allow for full typographic and design control, but at the cost of needing to fit things into a predefined page layout.

EPUB is a more fluid format that is supported by the Apple iPad, iPhone, and now on the desktop with OS X Mavericks. It’s also supported by Google Play for Android devices. While EPUB is supported on other devices, you’re likely to choose EPUB because you’re targeting your book at the Apple audience.

MOBI is a format originally developed for the Mobipocket Reader but more popularly supported by the Amazon Kindle. If you’re looking to attract the Kindle audience or publish to Amazon via the Kindle Direct Publishing platform then the HTML-based MOBI format is the format you’ll want to go with.

There's a large variety of devices in today's world. Try and support as many as possible [photo credit]

You can't program

There are plenty of platforms that make it easy for you to make your draft into a fully-fledged ebook without getting too technical.

Michael Hyatt chose writing software Scrivener, which generates a number of ebook formats. He describes his experiences in 5 Reasons I Switched to Scrivener for All My Writing.

Sean Brady chose marketplace LeanPub, which generates epub, mobi and pdf versions that you can publish on the site as well as elsewhere. He describes his experiences in Why I Chose Self-publishing with Leanpub.

For more of an overview of ebook marketplaces, many of which will help you with formatting, you could try David Carnoy's post on How to self-publish an ebook and Publishers Weekly's post on DIY: How to self-publish an e-book.

For help with formatting your ebook for Kindle, download Amazon's free guide.

Just make sure you work out what cut all these middle-men take – some are more transparent than others.

Also, remember that if no one is searching for your ebook in one of these marketplaces, then it won't come up. This doesn't mean there isn't demand for it – just that readers aren't always 100% sure what ebook they need.

You can program

If you have some programming skills and want full control of the output then consider doing everything yourself with the help of some useful tools.

Jonathan Snook decided to write in HTML:

By writing in HTML, I already had something that I could post on my website, use for the EPUB and use for the MOBI format. All without having to change a thing.

He used Prince XML to generate a PDF via a command line interface, and created an epub by running two commands once he'd got the right files in place. He then used Calibre to create a Mobi.

Prince XML comes with a hefty price tag however. Mathias Meyer writes about how he uses DocRaptor to generate the final result instead:

You can use Prince locally to generate infinite test PDFs, and then use DocRaptor to generate the final result. Which is what I do. Before generating the PDF through DocRaptor I upload the generated HTML, which includes all the CSS, to S3, to avoid some issues I've had with Unicode characters in the HTML, and tell DocRaptor to fetch it from a URL instead.

You might also consider using Pandoc, a document converter than can turn formats into other formats. This blog post by Puppet Labs explains how to use Pandoc to convert a Markdown page into an epub file.

Sally Jenkinson used a step-by-step guide produced by Five Simple Steps to create an ebook.

Around this time, Five Simple Steps very sadly (temporarily) closed its doors, but not without leaving the world with a great resource in the form of creating-ebooks.com. This was invaluable for helping me learn about the process of making ebooks. I grabbed the files and immediately created an initial prototype, and proceeded to populate it with my work in progress HTML.

13. Test and validate your ebook formats

Sally Jenkinson found that reader software would overrule some of her programming decisions so that testing was vital:

Test on as many devices as you can, and see how belligerent some of them are vs how desperate you are to make your book look beautiful. Many will refuse to acknowledge your commands because they place greater emphasis on user preferences, so accept that there will be some battles you do not win.

It's also a good idea to run your files through a validator to be sure you don't have any broken links or other warnings or errors. Puppet Labs have a good section on Validating & Debugging your EPUB & MobiPocket files. You can validate epub formats using Flightcrew.

14. Sign up to a platform like SendOwl to sell your ebook from your own website

Selling your ebook direct from your website or blog allows for the workings of serendipity (someone landing on your website and realising, in that moment, that your ebook is just what they need) and for you to stimulate demand. It also allows you to establish a much stronger connection with your customers.

For a more detailed look at why selling direct can be a great way to market your ebook and make money check out our blog post: 7 reasons why you should sell direct from your website.

Handling your own distribution allows you to create a deeper one-on-one connection with your customers, something that is impossible with other distribution channels since you don’t get customer information through other services—even though you are giving them a huge chunk of your sales! Jonathan Snook

Once you upload an ebook (or several) to SendOwl, which takes about a minute, you can start selling on social media immediately using a short url. Then you just need to add a Buy Now or Add to Cart button to your website or blog and you can sell direct to readers.

A few digital delivery companies – like SendOwl – also include useful marketing features that can help you make money with no extra marketing spend. After analysing millions of orders we found that one-click upsells can increase your total revenue between 4-20%. Used as a marketing strategy, Pay what you want pricing can also be surprisingly effective. Discounts are also a tried and tested way of encouraging customers to make a purchase, often in conjunction with a known sales period like Christmas or Black Friday where we saw our customers' sales increase by an average of 337%.

Interested in how SendOwl works? Try our free 30 day trial and start selling to a global audience (customers can even pay you in Bitcoins!).

This is all that's required to buy an ebook on SendOwl

Of course, selling from your own website or blog is probably only going to be part of your marketing strategy. Amazon still dominates the ebook market with 67% of the market, while Nook has 11.8% and Apple 8.2% (BISG report, 2013).

There are also plenty of smaller players, including some that also allow you to distribute though the major marketplaces as well. Options include: Kobo, Lulu, Smashworlds, Bookbaby, Booktango and Vock.

Keep your mind open to fresh opportunities though – epublishing is still a developing market; tomorrow’s players may be entirely different and it’s the early adopters who will benefit from keeping abreast of new routes to market.

Part IV: Work on a launch strategy

15. Make sure your website and sales page look good

Not another thing to think about! However, you've already got a functioning website or blog, so this shouldn't be too time consuming. But why do you need a separate sales page? Can't you just put an advert on your homepage or blog pages? You could, but it makes sense to send interested readers straight to a dedicated landing page for your ebook. That way they can learn more about your ebook (and you) and decide whether to buy, without getting distracted by other content.

If you need some help constructing a landing page then there are plenty of resources on the web. This Beginner's Guide to Landing Pages by KISSmetrics is a good place to start.

Landing pages need to be greatly simplified compared to many other website designs. This is because landing pages have very specific goals and shouldn’t include any extraneous information that might distract your visitors and prevent them from converting.

If you're looking for examples of what not to do, Unbounce also offers advice in their blog post 22 Brutally Honest Landing Page Critiques. It's best not to include extraneous information on your ebook landing page although do include your email so readers can contact you with any issues or with feedback.

16. Work out who you'll ask for reviews – be ambitious

Build a reviews strategy into your product launch. Make a list of people you want to review your book and consider sending them a (free) copy before your general launch. Don't panic if you get the odd bad review. These can add authenticity and show that it's not just your friends and family reviewing your book!

Patrick Barkham in a Guardian Online article shows how Rachel Abbott, who became an Amazon No 1 bestseller, built a successful reviews strategy:

Abbott took the "high-risk" approach of sending a review request document to bloggers who wrote about thrillers (only choose relevant bloggers). Just like any job application or sales pitch, a personalised request is most persuasive; so is one including details about your book and links to any previous reviews, Twitter feeds and websites to whet the bloggers' appetites. Offers of interviews or guest blogs may also encourage bloggers to publicise your book.

17. Line up talks at book festivals, bookshops, interest groups, your local library, online, or wherever your target audience might turn up

Just because you're publishing an ebook, doesn't mean that you need to exclusively market it using social media. Consider giving a talk or workshop at your local library, meetup group or online.

You don't even have to read from your book. Sometimes you're more likely to be given publicity opportunities if you're willing to talk about the theme of your book or take part in a panel discussion.

So long as you position yourself as someone who is interested and enthusiastic about an area connected to your ebook, and willing to talk about it in an accessible way, people will listen to you. You'll also get a much better conversion rate from people you've met.

You'll get a better conversion rate from people you've met so take part in talks and panel discussions [photo credit]

Be ambitious when lining up talks and workshops. To launch his book The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World Chris Guillebeau embarked on a 63 city book tour. He may have spent a lot of time and effort on promotion, but he was rewarded by excellent sales.

18. Work out pricing and maximise your revenue

How much should you charge for your ebook? This is one of the most tricky questions you're likely to face. The most common ebook prices are $17, $27 and $37, but really you're much better considering how much your competitors are charging, what your readers are willing to pay (are they successful business people or slightly skint teenagers?) and what value you're offering.

You might also want to consider whether you want to maximise sales or revenue. If you charge a cheaper price you might get more exposure as people are willing to take a chance on you.

Certain platforms like Kindle also penalise you for charging less than $2.99 or more than $9.99. The royalty rate plunges from 70% to 35% – although of course if you sell direct from your own website you don't run into this kind of problem.

Once you've decided on a baseline price, you can maximise your revenue from people who have landed on your website and want to buy your ebook. Consider doing some or all of the below:

Consider bundling bonus material with your ebook and charging more. So, you could offer your ebook for sale at one price, the ebook plus an extra article or video for a higher price, and the ebook plus some face-time with you, the expert, for an even higher price. This is a good way to get lots of your readers to pay that bit more.
Consider introducing constraints – perhaps your highest priced package is only available to 25 readers because you have only so much time to fulfill the consultancy angle? That way, you can introduce a sense of exclusivity and value. This is a good way to get a few big wins. However, tread carefully. If your constraint feels made up you'll put people off.
Offer a discount for people who buy a number of books within a set time period – perhaps your first 24 hours – to stimulate demand and create a sense of buzz. Alternatively, offer some kind of a deal. This is a good way to extend your reach. Tim Ferris offered a number of deals to encourage early sales, including this one:

Once people have bought your book, consider following up and asking them to become an affiliate, if they enjoyed it and their values align with yours. This is a good way of rewarding people who like your ebook and also prompting them to give your ebook a bit more visibility. Platforms like SendOwl make it easy for you to manage affiliates.
If you haven't already, take pre-orders for your ebook. If people come to your site, read about your ebook in progress, and like the sound of it, you want them to take action – not say 'hum, I'll buy this later' and then forget about it because they have a busy life.

19. Start your pre-launch email sequence

By planning a pre-launch sequence, you can extract the most value from your email list. During the sequence you build excitement about your ebook so your readers are eager to get their hands on it when it's released.

A pre-launch sequence involves sending out a series of emails over a 7-10 day period about your ebook launch. Aim for about 5 emails. Hopefully you've been keeping in contact with your list regularly so they won't be too surprised by your email.

Initially, just let people know you've got an upcoming ebook as part of a more general mail out, and then build anticipation and send out emails more regularly as the launch date approaches. Focus more on the ebook you're about to launch with your latter emails.

Make sure you write about how your ebook will benefit your readers, rather than listing features or doing a hard sell. Consider offering a sneak-peak or an instant takeaway that offers the reader value. For tips on how to read emails people actually want to read try this blog post by customer.io. MailChimp also have plenty of resources to help you send better emails.

And make sure you do a quick test with a short email list (you and a friend) in advance to avoid a last minute panic.

20. LAUNCH!

Launch earlier in the day so if there are problems you can deal with them.

Send out your final launch email, making sure it contains an obvious call to action saying that your ebook is now available and reminding your readers of any time or other constraints.

Hurrah! Your ebook is now live and (hopefully) people are buying it.

Launching your book will feel a little like this

Have a launch party or go to the pub. You deserve it.

In the days after your launch, be ready to respond to readers on social media, whether they are saying something nice, asking a question or reporting a problem of some kind. Check your social media pages every few hours for comments. Also search for your name and ebook title in Twitter Search in case comments haven't come directly to you. Look out for unanswered questions, but also any positive comments that you can share with your community. It's nice for your readers to feel like they can contact you easily through social media, so show them that you are connected and are using it regularly.

Part V: Assess how the launch has gone & make future plans

21. Keep putting out useful, informative content on social media and engaging with other people's content

Although it's tempting, try not to just talk about your awesome ebook on social media as this can easily turn followers off. Look for opportunities to engage with other people, and share and comment on their content. This will more often than not lead them to finding out a bit more about you and who you are.

When you do bring your ebook into the conversation, experiment with sending readers straight to your sales page by tweeting a short link. The easier you make it for people to buy your ebook the more likely they are to make the purchase.

However, this tactic will only work is readers know enough about your ebook to want to buy it before they click on the link.

22. Analyse

Although it's heartening to see your sales figures ticking up, you'll want to spend time analysing which of your marketing strategies are working and which are not. Ask yourself: Which marketing avenues are bringing in the most customers? Can you concentrate your marketing efforts on these avenues? For example, if you're getting a stream of engaged readers through targeted guest posting then consider doing more.

Make sure you concentrate on meaningful metrics though. If you're getting a decent number of site visitors from one avenue, but they don't spend much time on your site, and very rarely convert, then this marketing channel isn't really working for you, despite the % increase in site visitors.

If you're not entirely sure what marketing strategy is working, test a specific strategy and assess the results. Then you can either repeat if successful or try something else if not.

By this point, you'll also be able to see which affiliates are working out and which aren't. Consider rewarding the ones who are doing well with a better commission rate.

Although it's heartening to see your sales figures ticking up, you'll want to spend time analysing which of your marketing strategies are working and which are not.

Analyse your readers' feedback. Literary consultant Claire Wingfield found that her readers gave her some great ideas about how to describe and market her book 52 Dates for Writers. They told her what they found useful and what particularly appealed to them – information which she could then use to more effectively promote the book to her target audience.

Don't worry if your sales are a bit slow. You can still make money from your ebook indirectly as Jane Portman explains in her blog post How to Have Zero Sales and Still Make Money.

23. Write your next ebook

You've done it! You've published, promoted and sold your ebook. But don't get too comfortable...

Consider whether you can launch other digital products to complement your ebook. Can you offer a webinar or an online course on a subject that you write about, for example?

Also, start thinking about your next ebook. Don't leave it too long or your readership might forget you! Each new product offers you an opportunity to promote your old ones, provided they don't date too fast.

Infographic

Can't remember all the steps? Then why not grab our handy infographic below (click for full size version or hover to share)

Tell me more

How to make your videos accessible

2014-10-15T00:00:00Z

Selling videos online is a great way to expand your business. You can sell videos on how to program, how to learn to surf or how to improve your crochet skills – the options are enormous. However, you want to reach as large an audience as possible. In this blog post we'll look at a few ways to make your videos more accessible to mobile users, viewers with hearing impairments or who speak a foreign language, and viewers who want to stream your videos rather than download them.

1. Viewers want to consume and share your video on any device

Gone are the days when your audience just watched videos on their desktops. Now, they want to watch your videos on their laptops, tablets and on their mobile phones. According to Reel SEO, one quarter of US adults watch video on smartphones every week.

This demand is only likely to increase. According to The Telegraph:

The growth of 4G services is leading to a rapid increase in demand for mobile video, with subscribers on 4G mobile networks 1.5 times more likely to watch video than subscribers on 3G networks.

There is also growing demand for mobile video from developing countries, where phone and smartphone use in increasing rapidly. According to a video by Bloomberg, 200-250 million English-speaking smartphone users will soon be online, making India a 'mobile-first' country.

If you distribute your video through channels like YouTube, then they will make sure your videos display on different devices. However, even if you are giving away your video for free as part of your content marketing strategy, YouTube mobile doesn't necessarily help you get your audience back to your website where they convert. Reel SEO writes:

Most annotations don’t work on YouTube mobile (which are commonly used to drive viewers back to your site), and it's difficult for viewers to read comments and look at the video description (normally a place where you can link to more of your branded content), so relying on YouTube mobile to drive viewers into your funnel isn’t totally ideal.

One tactic is to embed videos on your own website and promote these using YouTube.

If you want to sell your video, however, you'll need to deal with issues such as payment gateway integration, video hosting and delivery of your video to customers. Some digital delivery platforms like SendOwl will automate all these processes so once you've uploaded a video to their site you don't need to do anything else – apart from smile at your sales reports.

However, make sure your digital delivery service ensures your video works on different devices. Here at SendOwl we've worked hard so that your audience enjoys watching your video – no matter what device they're using.

The growth of 4G services is leading to a rapid increase in demand for mobile video

2. Viewers may not speak your language very well, have a hearing impairment or just want to be clear about what's being said because there is background noise in the office!

There's a compelling business case for making your videos accessible to viewers who are hard of hearing, who are foreign language speakers or who have low literacy levels.

According to Audio Accessibility, 1 in 5 people in the USA are deaf, 1 in 5 are foreign language speakers and 43% have low literacy levels. These are all people who may want to buy your videos – but won't if you fail to make them accessible.

The Office of Communications also estimates that 7.5 million people in the UK (around 18% of the population) use closed captions, but only 1.5 million are deaf or hard of hearing. That's a lot of people in noisy offices who prefer to watch captioned videos.

But isn't captioning your videos really complicated? Not necessarily. You can caption your videos yourself, if you have the time, and some expertise. If your video is free, you can ask viewers to help – which is something that Amara, a "wiki style translation platform" can help with.

Or you can use one of the many services that offer transcription and captioning, including 3 Play Media and Amara. Prices start from as little as $2.50 a minute.

There's a compelling business case for making your videos accessible to viewers who are hard of hearing, who are foreign language speakers or who have low literacy levels.

Another way to make your videos more accessible is to bundle a transcript of your videos with your video for your audience to download. At least then your viewers can read your script as they watch your video.

This might all sound rather pricey and time-consuming, but the return on investment can be substantial. Audio Accessibility estimates that captioned videos increase viewership by 40%.

Discovery Digital Networks captioned over 100 of its videos over 8 YouTube channels, and compared to performance of those videos against ones that were un-captioned. In the first 14 days, it received a 13.48% lift in views on those videos that were closed captioned. However, some of the lift in views can be because captioned videos are better optimised for search. If you sell videos, then search engine optimisation will be less important because your videos won't be freely viewable.

3. Viewers want to consume your video when they want, how they want

To reach the largest possible audience for your video, give your viewers the chance to watch it when they want, how they want.

Most viewers will want to choose how they watch your video. Some will want to download your video and watch it later; others will want to stream it. Here are a few factors that make streaming a better option:

A fast connection speed

Generally, you need a fast connection to stream videos, particularly high definition videos. Otherwise your viewers will have to wait as it buffers, which can be very annoying. About Technology suggests:

You must have a fast internet connection to stream high definition videos from the internet without interruption. Many video websites will determine the quality of the video streamed to your device based on their estimation of your internet speed. Typically, it is best to have an internet connection of at least 2 megabits per second (Mbps). HD video may require over 3 Mbps so the video doesn't not have to pause as it buffers.

Limited hard drive space

Some of your viewers may not want to download a video because it will take up valuable space on their hard drives. In this case, they'd prefer to stream. A streamed file is never saved on viewers' devices.

Want to watch the video immediately

Downloading videos can take some time, particularly if they are long. In this scenario, viewers may prefer to stream the video that they've just purchased immediately rather than waiting for it to download.

Here are a few factors that make downloading a more attractive option:

Want to 'own' the video

Streaming feels more like you are renting a video – which is the business model of companies like Netflix or Amazon Instant Video. Downloading, in contrasts, feels more like you're buying the video – you can then watch it when you want, how you want, on whatever device you want. Some viewers will be happy with the former option, while others will expect the latter.

Want to watch the video off-line

Some of your viewers will want to watch your video on their way to work – and they won't always have a good internet connection. In this scenario, they'll want to download your video at home and then play it on their commute.

To reach the largest possible audience for your video, give your viewers the chance to watch it when they want, how they want.

Conclusion

Making your videos accessible – whether that means making sure your videos work on mobile, adding captions or enabling streaming – will significantly extend your potential audience. Suddenly, you'll be appealing to everyone from mobile-mostly users to people who are hard of hearing or simply work in a noisy office.

Happy birthday to us!

2014-10-06T00:00:00Z

Four years ago SendOwl was called Digital Delivery and was run by our founder George, in his spare time, from his kitchen table. Now, four years later, after considerable hard work, SendOwl is a flying concern with a feathery mascot and a growing customer base. It's been quite a journey – and we'd like to thank you, our loyal customers, for helping us on our way.

So, why are we here?

Realising there was no easy and reliable way to sell digital creations online (quite the opposite in fact), tech entrepreneur, George Palmer, created SendOwl.

He wanted to make it easy for the creators of ebooks, indie video games, video, infographics, design template, magazines, crochet patterns, or anything digital, to sell direct from their website or blog. He figured that selling direct was important for any business – you get to build relationships with your customers and get a much higher share of your profits.

SendOwl has since grown to become a market leader in digital delivery – serving everyone from individual creatives to entrepreneurs to major multi-national companies.

Why are we different?

For a start, we’ve kept SendOwl free from outside influence. There are no angel investors trying to grow the company so fast everything is a blur and then sell it for millions to some US tech giant. We have a different vision of the future, one where you’re the focus.

Our founder George still runs the show and we have full control. We’re bootstrapped, profitable, debt-free and 100% employee owned. And we’re proud of that.

We’re here for the long run, and we hope you are too.

Where do we go from here?

One advantage of being a lean, bootstrapped team is that we're able to innovate quickly – whether that means launching our new streamlined checkout, reordering the downloads page or working on our new video streaming feature.

We hope that you've been enjoying the new features we've rolled out in the last few months. We've plenty more in the pipeline and can't wait to share them with you.

Who is the SendOwl?

The Send Owl is a four year old blue owl from a small wood in southern England. After school, and inspired by Hedwig in Harry Potter, he decided to concentrate on the mail solutions industry. Sadly, he couldn’t find a wizard to work for. However, he did find George and was persuaded by him to set his sights on the digital space.

Although quite a shy character when he first joined the company, the Send Owl is now starting to ruffle his plumage. Although always known for his polite, friendly and straightforward character, he’s now beginning to show signs of an understated sense of humour – as well as occasional Monday morning grumpiness. His first book, Descending From the Perch: An Owl’s Guide to the Modern World, will be published in 2015.

Make life easy for your viewers with our new video streaming feature

2014-10-03T00:00:00Z

When your customers bought a video previously they needed to download it. This can be a great option, but it's not for everyone. So, based on your feedback, we're happy to announce our new video streaming feature. This means that your viewers can stream your videos without having to download them. So, you can keep all your viewers happy, whatever their viewing preferences.

How can video streaming make life easier for you?

Piracy is always a concern when you allow people to download your videos. With video streaming you can give people access to your videos without requiring them to download it – and potentially share it without permission or sell it on.

You don't need to lose sales to gain security though: video streaming is also popular with customers.

How can video streaming make life easier for your customers?

If your viewers have just bought your video the odds are that they are excited by it. They can't wait to watch it, preferably as soon as possible.

However, if your video is pretty large, say over 1GB, and your viewers internet connection isn't brilliant, then they'll have to wait for the video to download. And wait. This can be really frustrating.

We've done everything we can to improve this situation our end, but we can't make people have a better internet connection or more space on their hard drive!

Video streaming means your viewers can now choose to watch your video immediately rather than waiting for it to download.

How do you enable video streaming?

It couldn't be simpler to enable video streaming. When you upload a video, you'll now see a video streaming checkbox. Simply select this to stream a video by default.

Instead of seeing a download button on the downloads page, your viewers will see a watch now button, which takes them to the video player page.

If you want to give your viewers the choice of viewing options, there's also a checkbox to allow downloads as well as streaming.

Can your viewers watch your videos on different devices?

Your viewers will want to watch your videos on different devices, which can be technically complicated, but we've got it covered. The encoding of your videos into several formats for maximum device support will happen automatically. You don't need to do anything.

We've also made the video player page responsive, so your viewers have a great experience whether they are watching on a large screen or a small one.

Where can I find out more?

There's more details on this new functionality in our knowledge base article on video streaming

Selling downloadable products on Shopify

2014-09-26T00:00:00Z

Selling downloadable products on Shopify is easy using the SendOwl app. Whenever your products are sold we'll automatically deliver a secure, time-limited download link to your customer. It doesn't matter if you sell 1 or 10,000 products a day - everything is automated and there's no daily management required. Oh and did we mention the downloads were instant? No waiting for 60 seconds when using this app.

How you can sell digital products on Shopify

Shopify makes it easy for you to create an ecommerce store with almost no technical knowledge. It's a very popular option for businesses that want to sell products direct to customers.

Although big players like Budweiser, Gatorade and Wikipedia use Shopify, the company is also keen to encourage smaller businesses and startups to sign up. Shopify now offer a ‘lite’ plan for $9/month, which gives merchants the same eCommerce platform, minus a few of the more advanced features and functionalities.

However, Shopify doesn't have the built in functionality to allow you to sell digital products online. To do that, you'll need to choose one of the apps from the Shopify App Store. Shopify have come out with their own free app but it's very basic. SendOwl has the top rated digital delivery app in the Shopify App Store with more than 85 five star reviews.

How to connect Sendowl with Shopify

It should take you less than 3 minutes to install the SendOwl app and add your first product. The stages are:

Install app
Add your SendOwl download link to Shopify (optional)
Upload your products

Watch this short video to see how easy it is to start selling digital products with the SendOwl app:

What our users have to say

SendOwl is more than just a Shopify app – we run an entire ecommerce platform. As an established company, we care about providing a service that is professional, secure and easy to use, and have more than five years' experience of doing just that.

We're not going to disappear overnight or decide not to invest in our app any longer because we've moved on to something else. We're in this for the long term, and we hope you are too.

Here are a few of our customer testimonials. There are a lot more on the customers section of our website.

SendOwl has simplified our online sales process more than I thought possible. It's user interface is simple to follow and easy to use and the overall experience has made selling products and services online so much easier - Chris Ducker

It took me 10 years to overcome my self-doubts to launch an automated online business... It took me 10 hours to setup up my Tools4Wisdom digital downloads store ... It THEN took me 1 hour to install and setup SendOwl - and another 1 hour wait to receive my first automated digital order! Spectacular! - Laszlo Nadler

Take us for a test drive

10 website mistakes that will lose you mobile customers

2014-09-23T00:00:00Z

With mobile use continuing to grow, all businesses need to make sure that their content looks good on mobile. Here are some common website mistakes that will lose you mobile customers, with a few suggestions about how to fix them.

1. Your website isn't responsive

It's easy to think of your website as a series of pages on which you can arrange your content. So, you may plan to have some copy top left, a picture just below it and a side bar to the right.

However, if you treat your website as a series of pages, then you'll please some customers who happen to browse on the 'correct' size of screen. All your other customers will have a much poorer browsing experience.

If your customers browse on a mobile, they'll have to pinch and zoom to see anything – and might not bother. If they browse on a large screen, they won't be impressed that your website is hunched up in the middle of the screen like something from the 1990s.

A recent report on mobile behaviour found that 91% of customers say access to content any way they want is important.

Instead, think of your website as a fluid package of content pieces that will look different on different devices.

To make sure that your content looks good on mobiles you have a few choices. You can create a special app for mobile users. The main advantages is your customers can browse this offline and you can be creative in terms of features and user experience. The disadvantage is that you have to update content on your website and on your app, which can be hard work. Apps are also only built for certain operating systems, you have to play by the rules of the app store, and marketing your app can be difficult.

By 2015, more Americans will access the internet through mobile devices than through desktop computers, according to a prediction by the International Data Corporation. - Karen McGrane, Content Strategy for Mobile

You can also create a mobile website, which provides a good user experience for your mobile users and can be quick to load. On the other hand, you are forking your content, making it harder to update, and creating two urls.

Or you can make your website responsive. The main advantage is you have one website, which is easier to update in terms of content. The downside is that it can be difficult optimising your responsive site for all devices. Increasingly, the main website-building platforms let you choose responsive templates when you design your own website.

This article on The Pros and Cons of Responsive Web Design vs. Mobile Website vs. Native App offers a useful introduction to the different options.

If you employ and agency or developer, you might need to consider a redesign if you decide to make your website responsive. If you go down this route, make sure you think about whether all your copy and visuals will work on mobile as well.

Think of a website redesign as the perfect opportunity to edit, archive, reformat and update all your content to make it work cross-platform. It's better for content to look good on all screen sizes that great on one device and terrible on the others.

This is how the checkout for SendOwl looks on a mobile. We wanted to make sure it was as easy to use as possible:

2. Your infographics and tables are barely readable on mobile

Infographics can be an effective way of conveying complex information in a clear and attractive manner. Financial startup Mint used infographics very successfully to expand their reach and attract more customers. Their infographics are attractively designed and contain genuinely useful content.

However, try and avoid using too many fixed sized infographics and tables that are unreadable on smaller screens unless you want to alienate your mobile customers. But who are your mobile customers? They can be anyone – including people who browse on mobiles in their lunch break even though they have a desktop in the office and a laptop at home. And it's their first impression of your landing page or blog that they'll remember.

This is how a big infographic can look on mobile – could you be bothered reading it?

One way to improve how your infographics look on mobiles is to create them vertically so they scale down well. Alternatively, you can serve up two infographics or tables: one that works on larger screens and one that is optimised for smaller screens.

3. Your website has too much copy and it doesn't scan well

It's tempting to treat your website like a filling cabinet, with a particularly large drawer reserved for your homepage. You upload as much information as possible about your company because you want to communicate your product.

Someone might just need that FAQ section; someone else surely wants to read your mission statement and that very long PDF about your strategic plan for the next two years.

Surely more content is better?

Not really. The point of your content is to communicate your product clearly to your customer so they are certain they will benefit from buying it – and will make the purchase. Relevant content also saves your company money because useful, usable content educates potential leads and existing customers about your product so they don't have to talk to your customer service team so often.

85% of our respondents said mobile devices are a central part of everyday life. - Mobile Behaviour Report, 2014

Too much irrelevant content can prevent customers finding the information that they need at the point that they need it. Badly formatted and under-edited content can do the same. Many customers will scan your content – and if you have a wall of copy then they might not bother.

Try and write your content for mobile first. Not only will you end up with content that works cross-platform, but you'll probably end up with more relevant content full stop. A lot of content we upload to websites 'because we can' probably shouldn't be there.

4. Your website has lots and lots of pages

Websites with lots of pages can perform quite badly on mobile. This is because it's tedious to have to keep loading new pages to find the information that you're looking for. What news article would you rather read on mobile? One that you can just keep scrolling down to read, or one that is stretched over three different pages?

Because of the increase in mobile usage, people are more used to scrolling, even on desktops. This is why you'll have seen more long-form homepages around on the web, like this one by Litmus.

67 percent of consumers say they are more likely to purchase from a mobile-friendly website than they are from a website not optimized for devices other than desktop. - The Next Web

Consider whether some of your content should be displayed on one page, perhaps with a sticky navigation or anchor links at the top so people can quickly find other information if they want to.

Alternatively, make sure that you offer people a very good reason to click through to another page. Jared Spool, CEO of User Interface Engineering, often writes and speaks about 'the scent of information', meaning that if you give your customers a clear idea of what they'll find when they take an action they are more likely to move deeper into your website.

5. Your call to action buttons are too small

Unless you optimise your site for different screen sizes, you may end up with Buy Now buttons that are barely big enough for a customer to see let alone get a big finger on.

Don't make it any trickier for customer to select a button on your website than it already is considering the size of some mobiles. Make sure that all your call to action buttons are big, clear and in a different colour to your main website colours so they stand out.

Although the WWF include two calls to action at the top of the screen, they make both of them easy to read and select:

6. Your product teasers, summaries and headings get truncated on mobile

As content strategist Karen McGrane says:

Writing a good teaser is one of the simplest things you can do to help your users orient themselves so they can find what they're looking for

However, many product teasers are non-existent, badly written or truncated. This leads to confusion, particularly on mobiles, where users want more reassurance that a link will take them where they want to go.

Avoid reusing content from desktops that gets truncated on mobiles. A sentence that stops half way through will not persuade mobile users to select that link.

Similarly, avoid writing summaries and headlines that get chopped off on mobiles. Cutting off copy arbitrarily is frustrating for users who can't make sense of the heading or summary and don't fancy clicking a 'read more' link to access a few measly extra words.

Karen McGrane suggests writing a number of headlines, summaries and teasers that you can serve up on different devices. If this sounds like too much hard work, consider writing for mobile first and seeing if you really do need those extra words.

If you're still not sure that you need to optimise your website for mobile users, consider that in a recent report on mobile behaviour 76% of smartphone users and 70% of tablet users looked for information online. That's a lot of people whose first impression of your website will be on a small screen.

7. Your website has lots of large images and videos

If you have a lot of images and videos on your website then it might be slow to load on a mobile due to mobile data (3G/4G). This can severely affect your conversion rate.

According to Kissmetrics, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less and a 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

Kissmetrics has two tips for reducing image size.

Optimize Your Images – In Photoshop or Fireworks, you can use the “Save for Web” option to drastically reduce image size. An image quality slider lets you see the visual trade-offs between graphic file size and crispness. Don’t have a graphics program? Smush.it from Yahoo can do the trick.
Don’t Rely on HTML to Resize Images – HTML (and by extension, WordPress blogs), make it easy to create a smaller version of a larger graphic. But just because you load that smaller size, doesn’t mean it’s taking up any less room on the server. The browser still has to load the ENTIRE image, THEN check the width and height you want and THEN resize it accordingly.

Karen McGrane suggests creating a system of image crops that will serve a wide range of contexts and image resolutions.

Alternatively, consider whether you actually need all that visual content. Do users actually want to see all those pictures?

8. Your website doesn't show a user the most useful content first on a mobile

On a large screen you may feel that you have plenty of room to communicate your key business messages. However, this isn't entirely true. Most desktop users skim their way through content rather than reading it. You probably only have a few seconds to convince users to stay on your site. And what's true on desktops, is even more true on mobiles.

Concentrate on prioritising your content so that your primary message displays first on all screens, followed by your secondary and third messages. This way you'll stand a better chance of earning the attention of a mobile user.

This approach will only work if your key business messages also mesh with user need though. Just because you want to tell a customer the life story of your business at the earliest opportunity, doesn't mean that's the first thing a customer wants to know when they land on your website.

Delivering content on mobile isn't an afterthought. It's a necessity. It isn't a luxury. It's a requirement. - Karen McGrane, Content Strategy for Mobile

If you don't know what a customer wants from your website, consider doing some user research such as customer interview or surveys, as well looking at your analytics to see how customers currently behave on your website.

To effectively convey your key messages, consider using copywriting tricks like writing your first sentence as a summary, putting the most important idea first, and using one topic per paragraph. You could also use bulleted lists, which are easy to scan, and highlighting keywords like hyperlinks.

9. Your website comments and reviews sections unfold endlessly on a mobile

Consider whether it would be better to put some subsections of content behind a section header that can be expanded. For example, Wikipedia display the full introduction to an article and then the headers for each subsection for mobile users.

Reviews and comment sections may work better behind a header than can be expanded and contracted. This way, users can easily access the content if they want, but aren't intimidated by a page that seems to scroll down endlessly.

This website containing free technical videos puts comments and show notes behind section headers on small screens:

10. Your mobile website or app contains only half the information your customer needs

If you decide to create an app or a mobile website instead of going down the responsive design route, then be cautious about serving up only part of your content. Mobile users increasingly complete all kinds of tasks on their smartphones and tablets – even while sitting on the sofa!

In a recent report on mobile behaviour fifty-four percent of respondents say that mobile websites don’t give enough content.

Karen McGrane also shows the growth in the number of people who are 'mobile mostly' or 'mobile only' – meaning they will only ever read about your company on their mobile. Even back in 2011, twenty-eight percent of smartphone users went online mostly using their phone.

Let your users choose what information they want to find while browsing on their mobile, rather than making the decision yourself.

Increase your conversion rate with our new shopping cart

2014-09-16T00:00:00Z

Last month we launched our new shopping cart. Our goal was to make the buyer experience as easy, quick and reassuring as possible. But did we succeed? Yes! After a month of SendOwl sellers using the new checkout, we're delighted to announce a platform-wide increase in conversion rates of 6% for card payments and 12% for PayPal conversions.

Why did we launch a new shopping cart?

Plenty of conversion studies have shown that the less clicks during checkout there are, the higher your conversion rate will be. A recent YouEye survey concluded "Minimise the opportunities your customer has to say no: every stop in the checkout process is another chance for abandonment".

Bearing this is mind, we decided to make the SendOwl buyer experience as streamlined as possible. Your customer now only sees the information that really matters: the name of the product they are buying, the quantity and the total price (and whole numbers won't show unnecessary units). They then only need to provide an email, card number, expiry date and cvc to buy a product from your site.

Improve your conversion rate with our new shopping cart

After a month of SendOwl seller using the new cart, we're delighted to announce a site-wide increase in conversion rates of 6% for card payments (Stripe or Authorize.net) and 12% for PayPal conversions.

Host the shopping cart on your own website

You can now checkout everything on your own website, rather than just the cart, meaning that the buyer experience is as seamless as possible. Although we don't have stats on this feature yet to be statistically sound, we've seen a positive trend so far. SendOwl seller Andy Smith writes:

SendOwl seller Susie Romans is also pretty enthusiastic:

If you've already been using the cart instead of Instant Buy you'll be able to checkout on your own website without making any changes. If you've been using Instant Buy you'll need to add this Javascript code to your page:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://transactions.sendowl.com/assets/sendowl.js"></script>

Thanks for all the positive feedback on the new cart. It makes all the hard work worthwhile!

PDF stamping for ebook security [updated May 2017]

2014-09-05T00:00:00Z

If you've got a Google alert set for your PDF ebook or guide then the odds are you want to hear good news. Someone just blogged about your book? Great! And that was a cool tweet as well. What you probably don't want, however, is to find out that your digital product had just been ripped. Sure, maybe you get a small flash of pride that someone bothered. But mostly you feel annoyed. It's your book. Surely you should be deciding whether someone gets to read your painstakingly prepared publication for free, not someone else trying to make a quick buck?

Why do you need PDF stamping?

This is a dilemma faced by all authors selling digital products. J.K. Rowling was so concerned about piracy that she delayed publishing digital versions of her Harry Potter books for years, before launching the Pottermore website, which is the sole distributor of Potter ebooks. The statistics about pirated ebooks didn't offer much reassurance. After the launch of the iPad in 2010, there was a 78% rise in unauthorised book downloads on BitTorrent.

However, some of the security solutions can seem like overkill. Not selling your ebook for years like J.K. Rowling probably won't do much for your sales figures. Similarly, digital rights management (DRM) solutions that involve 'locking' your content inconvenience your readers who want to easily share their content across devices.

So, what to do? Well, we think that PDF stamping is a decent solution. It won't prevent people copying and sharing your book, but it does mean that you can track down who originally ripped your work and take action. Often, just having PDF stamping is enough to put off most would-be copiers. Plus you're still making life nice and simple for your loyal readers.

A PDF stamping tool is already built into SendOwl

When you sell with SendOwl, you can easily set up PDF stamping for your PDFs, meaning a visual watermark will be displayed on whichever pages you choose. In the example below, you'll see that this visual watermark includes your buyer's name, email address and an order ID at the bottom of the page (you can stamp all pages or just certain ones). So you can see who the PDF was originally sold to and deduce whether they are 'sharing' it in a way that you're not happy with.

The default is to include the buyer name, email address and order ID (and we'll do this – you don't have to input data manually). However, you can choose what information about your buyer that you wish to include.

You can choose how you style this buyer information – font, font size, font colour, and so on – to make sure that it matches the style of your PDF.

When you create a new product, just select the PDF stamping check box to activate PDF stamping.

PDFs are also encrypted and a random password added once stamping is complete for extra protection against copying. This won't affect how your PDF looks or the reader experience. Contact us if you'd prefer us not to do this.

We currently only offer PDF stamping although we're looking into stamping for other content such as epubs.

Automate PDF stamping

Once you've set up PDF stamping for your PDFs, you can sit back and relax. Each PDF you want protected will be automatically stamped with this extra buyer information.

Would be copiers will be deterred, while loyal readers will love how easy it is to buy your publication through SendOwl and then share it across devices.

For more information about how to set up PDF stamping go to our help section.

Seller interview with Christopher Sutton, founder of Easy Ear Training

2014-08-27T00:00:00Z

Christopher started Easy Ear Training because he was convinced that people can learn listening skills. In this interview, he chats to us about selling audio-enhanced ebooks direct from their website, giving away free content and why most people can learn to sing.

George: Can you tell us who you are and what you do?

Christopher: Sure. I am a thirtysomething Londoner, lived here most of my life with a bit of travel along the way. For the last four or five years I've run a company called Easy Ear Training. It's a music education technology company. We use the latest technology to make it easier for musicians to learn and develop their skills.

George: Are some people just naturally better at training their ear? Or can you teach all sorts of people?

Christopher: One of our biggest challenges is the preconception that you need to be gifted to be a great musician. It's one of those things where there's a grain of truth. But what trips people up is the idea that if someone can play a song by ear, for example, they must be gifted. If you can't do it, then that's that, you can't do it, never mind. The reality is that all of the listening skills are learnable. Although they might come more easily to some than to others, with dedicated ear training, and a bit of regular practice, you can learn to improvise, you can learn to play by ear, you can learn to write your own songs. Our company's mission is to help people see that they can learn the skills, and to give them the tools they need to do it quickly and easily.

George: What products have you developed to teach people to train their ear?

Christopher: We started off making iPhone apps that were little quiz games, where you hear something and then you get asked a question about it, and in that way you develop your skills. Over the last four or five years we've explored a number of other ways to teach, primarily through the web. We've published a few hundred articles and tutorials about this topic, with listening clips and little quizzes you can take there. More recently, we started publishing ebooks and training albums that we sell through SendOwl. We've now published five ebooks, one audio book and two training albums.

George: Are sound clips included with the ebooks?

Christopher: Yes, and that was an interesting learning process last year. After a lot of experimentation with our ebook guy, we ended up producing a combination of formats. Both EPUBs and PDFs, in certain circumstances, let you play a sound clip directly from within the ebook.

George: What made you diversify from apps to digital products sold from your website?

Christopher: I looked around and there wasn't really a good website dedicated to ear training. Given that there are millions of musicians around the world, and the importance of this skill set, this seemed bizarre to me. I ended up ploughing a lot of the revenue from the apps back into the company to develop the website, commission articles and build up the content. We're now getting tens of thousands of visitors a month, all interested in ear training.

"The majority of our content is available for free through our website, including downloadable training apps. Our intention is to introduce people to the topic of ear training in a friendly, supportive way, and then introduce them to our course when they're ready to take the next step."

George: How do you market your products?

Christopher: There's a fair bit of cross-promotion between the apps and the info products, but essentially apps are marketed on the App store. There's not a lot you can do outside of the App store to promote them, unless you're a serious company with a big budget. I spent a year or two doing a lot of things outside the App store, hoping to sell more apps. It took me a while to accept that it's just a very strange ecosystem. We market our info products through our website. If someone comes to our website for a particular article, they learn about our free introductory email course, and sign up for that. Then, that course acts as a way to introduce them both to ear training and to our various other products.

George: How do you get people's emails?

Christopher: We've tried various things to find the right balance between being effective and avoiding being obnoxious. At this point we don't have a pop up, but we do have a feature box, at the top of the page. If you visit our website for the first time, there's a little box that says "Hi, welcome, this is what the site's all about, if you're new to the topic sign up for our free course".

"Our big focus this year is on the issue of tone deafness, and people learning to sing. I found that while our website is aimed at musicians who want to do ear training, a significant amount of our traffic was coming to a few pages on our site, that are dedicated to the complete beginner."

George: You also do a lot of content marketing?

Christopher: Yes, some people refer to it as education marketing, where you aim to give the customer a lot of value for free upfront, before you ever ask them to pay anything. That's very much our approach. The majority of our content is available for free through our website, including downloadable training apps. Our intention is to introduce people to the topic of ear training in a friendly, supportive way, and then introduce them to our course when they're ready to take the next step. The traditional marketing approach, which would be to give very little away for free, do a very good job at selling, and hopefully just drive people directly to a sale, is just not a good fit for our market.

George: So what's next for Easy Ear Training?

Christopher: Our big focus this year is on tone deafness, and people learning to sing. I found that while our website is aimed at musicians who want to do ear training, a significant amount of our traffic was coming to a few pages on our site that are dedicated to the complete beginner, like "What if I'm tone deaf?". I realised there's a significant proportion of the population that love music, but feel completely locked out of the world of learning music, because they've got it in their head that they're tone deaf. So earlier this year we launched tonedeaftest.com, which is a free test you can take to find out if you are genuinely tone deaf or not. Spoiler alert! The chances are you're not. Building on that project, and the results of that, we're now working on a new interactive app that teaches you to sing in tune. It listens to you sing, gives you feedback and helps you get to the point where you can be really confident about music and singing.

George: Chris, it's been an absolute pleasure. If people want to find you online, where do they go?

Christopher: Go to easyeartraining.com

Find out what three SendOwl sellers think about Bitcoins

2014-08-19T00:00:00Z

We asked three SendOwl sellers — Australian cartoonist Stuart McMillen, Introversion Software managing director Mark Morris and special effects producer Matthias Müller — why they started pricing their products in Bitcoins and how they see Bitcoins developing in the future. This is what they said.

Matthias Müller: special effects producer

1) Why did you decide to start accepting Bitcoins?

More and more people all over the world are suffering from our current economic and monetary systems; the idea of infinite economic growth is obviously just not going to work out in the long term. I think cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin can help to bring back some variety and freedom to the way we run our economy.

2) Do you feel consumers now see Bitcoin as a real payment alternative to credit cards?

I think Bitcoin has the potential to be a real alternative to credit cards in the future but for now I feel Bitcoin is still quite small; it just needs some time to grow.

3) How do you see Bitcoins developing in the future (in terms of usage rather than how it will develop technically)?

I think over the course of the next ten years the market capitalisation of cryptocurrencys will increase significantly. Whether Bitcoins will stay at the top or maybe a more advanced/eco-friendly alternative will take its place, I don’t know. In general I hope to see Bitcoins in coexistence with other currencies. Fiat money, local currencies, cryptocurrencies: they all have their strengths and weaknesses.

You can visit Matthias's site at matthiasm.de

Stuart McMillen: Australian cartoonist

1) Why did you decide to start accepting Bitcoins?

I decided to start accepting Bitcoins because of customer demand. Previously I was accepting payments via PayPal and credit card only. But there is a segment of people who choose not to use these payment methods. They prefer to use Bitcoins.

2) Do you feel consumers now see Bitcoin as a real payment alternative to credit cards?

Bitcoins are now becoming a mainstream payment method for internet transactions. I felt I was losing potential revenue by continuing to ignore this payment method.

3) How do you see Bitcoins developing in the future (in terms of usage rather than how it will develop technically)?

I can only see the use of Bitcoins growing from this point into the future.

You can visit Stuart's site at www.stuartmcmillen.com

Mark Morris: managing director of Introversion Software

1) Why did you decide to start accepting Bitcoins?

When I first heard about Bitcoins I got really excited. I feel that the idea has the potential to be the most significant advancement since the creation of the Internet itself. For me, a mathematical grounding in scarcity rather than an arbitrary natural resource (like gold) makes so much more sense in addition to the obvious benefit of it not being state controlled or owned. Bitcoins are the first truly universal currency and will allow people in the poorest and worst governed countries the ability to partake in the global market place and I truly think that this change will ultimately be revolutionary in the widest possible context of the world.

The vision will only become a reality as more companies start to accept Bitcoins and the trust in the system starts to grow. Whilst we weren’t amongst the first, it still feels like we are one of the pioneers to embrace this new economy and I feel really lucky to be given the opportunity.

2) Do you feel consumers now see Bitcoin as a real payment alternative to credit cards?

I think Bitcoins is still in its infancy and is seen as something of a novelty; however the only way that’ll change is as more and more vendors start accepting payment in Bitcoins. I think there are a significant number of early adopters of Bitcoins and I think they’ll gladly open their ewallets if given the opportunity.

3) How do you see Bitcoins developing in the future (in terms of usage rather than how it will develop technically)?

The system will continue to expand: more miners, more traders, more vendors. As the opportunity to spend Bitcoins increase, the desire to use them will continue to grow and in five to ten years I think the world will enjoy a wide-spread and stable, mathematically based truly independent currency.

You can visit Introversion at www.introversion.co.uk

Stop your downloads page turning into one big list

2014-08-08T00:00:00Z

If you give your customers access to a lot of digital files – perhaps as part of a bundle – then your downloads page will previously have looked like one big list. This wasn't ideal. So, based on your feedback, we've now made it easy for you to organise your digital downloads into folders. Here's a quick update as we know a lot of you have been waiting on this feature.

The new SendOwl grouping feature is straightforward to set up. Just go to advanced settings when you are editing (or adding) one of your products. Then enter a folder name in the Download Page Folder field.

Your downloads page will then be organised into neat folders that can be expanded and contracted, rather than just being one big list.

As well as making it easier for you to organise your digital downloads, this feature will also benefit your customers. They'll be able to see at a glance the type of downloads that they've just bought, and can decide how to proceed with downloading them.

Here's an example of a downloads page organised into folders:

That's all for now. To learn more see our knowledge base article on download page folders.

A Beginners' Guide to Finding Images

2014-08-05T00:00:00Z

In this blog post we've put together a few suggestions about where you can find great images. Because the right image really can be worth a thousand words – and finding it can be much cheaper and easier than you think!

Image libraries

Founded in 2000, iStockPhotos provides royalty-free, affordable images to online users. They've got a large catalogue of photos, illustrations, vectors, videos and music clips for you to choose from. You can either subscribe or buy credit for one off projects. How much an image costs varies, but you should be able to find something within your budget. Also look out for free files. If someone refers you to iStockPhoto, you can get 10 credits free to start you off.

"Posting photos and images is now a hugely important activity within social media. This focus on visual storytelling presents new opportunities and challenges for marketers. Pictures are great for attracting attention, expressing emotions or ideas and customers find it easier to identify with them. Social media posts without pictures attached will suffer from lower engagement rates, as they won't stand out in newsfeeds." Alison Battisby, Social Media Consultant

Another similar royalty-free image library is Shutterstock, founded in 2003. It offers a good choice of photos, vectors, editorial, illustrations, icons, footage and music. You can either take out a subscription or buy on demand. As an example, you can download 5 high-resolution photos for about $48. There is also a free vector and free photo every week.

If you specifically want icons, you could try a more specialised library like The Noun Project. As well as the usual icons, it offers more unconventional icons on diverse themes (World Cup Brazil; human nature; at the hospital) produced by different artists. There are a number of pricing plans, including a $0 and $10 a month plan.

Some image libraries offer images free for non-commercial use.

Creative Commons licenses

Although you can't use any image you download from the Internet (no matter how tempting!) you may be able to use images that the creator has marked as having a creative commons license. Be aware that there are different types of creative commons licenses though. Some creators may specify that you can only use their image for non-commercial use; others will let you do anything with their work (including producing derivative work based on it) in exchange for attribution. Attribution requires that you link back to the original source of the image that you're using.

Online photo management platforms like Flickr make it easy for you to search for images with different types of creative commons licenses. Here is their guide to the different licenses.

Don't just use images on the obvious, promotional pages of your website. Great images can also be used to help users out of tricky situations. If someone types in the wrong url on your website (/blgo instead of /blog for example) they get an error message. But this can sound scary to non-tech people and really isn't very helpful. Here at SendOwl we use a big pic of an owl to give people a small amount of pleasure – and also some instructional text and links so they can navigate to where they actually want to go. So, instead of making them feel lost and stupid, we give them a fun owl image to cheer them up and then swiftly get them back on track.

Graphic design and editing tools

Of course, sometimes it's not enough just to find a good image. You might need to touch it up or turn it into a Facebook cover. There are all kinds of image editing tools you can run on your computer or mobile device. These include:

Pixelmator (Mac)
Gimp (Mac, Windows, Unix – open source – steep learning curve)
Seashore (Mac – open source – basic)
Adobe Photoshop (Mac, Windows)
Paint.net (Windows – free)

However, if you don't have any of these installed, you can always use a free online editing tool like PicMonkey. If you feel like you've got a decent eye for design, you could try Canva, which makes it easyish to create designs for your Facebook Page, flyer, business cards (and so on) online. They have a free library of graphics, photos and fonts that you can use, as well as paid options. You can also collaborate with designers or fellow enthusiastic amateurs on the platform. Just make sure that you're honest with yourself as to whether you have a modicum of design talent. Even the best tools will only help so much!

We hope this short guide provides a useful starting point as you search for great images to use on your website. If you've got any more suggestions about finding great images we'd love to hear from you. Just give us a shout on social media!

Learn how to surf from a digital product

2014-07-28T00:00:00Z

Husband and wife team Martin and Annika produce the 110% Surfing Techniques videos, which have sold thousands of copies worldwide over the last five years. They also run Discovery Surf School in Devon. In this interview they talk us through making the move into digital products, selling from their own website, and how they produce their brilliant videos.

George: Okay, so you started out with a bricks and mortar business – a surf school?

Martin: Yeah. We've had Discovery Surf School for twelve years so that's where it all started. We developed our instructional techniques and then put them into video format, so that we reach people across the world. We started with DVDs six years ago when they were still really popular. Then we started doing digital versions last year, in November, and it has given the videos a really good lease of life. People can download them anywhere now, so it's really cool.

George: That's one of the great things about the Internet, you suddenly go from being a local business to a global business with a real speciality.

Martin: Oh, yeah. It's really crazy all the places the videos go. You expect a lot of sales from America, Australia and Brazil. There's lots of surfers there. But videos also go to South Korea, Taiwan, all through Europe, Guadalupe, just everywhere really.

George: What made you think to do the DVDs?

Martin: It was actually a friend of mine from Magicseaweed. He said there were instructional DVDs out there already that weren't really that good. He inspired me to crack on and make a product that would show our skills as instructors and pass that knowledge on to people all over the world. That kick-started it. We already had a customer base and we developed a product for them, working closely with Magicseaweed.

George: Okay. Who are those guys? How do they fit into it?

Martin: Magicseaweed are one of the biggest surf websites in the world. They forecast the surf and what it's going to be like on beaches everywhere. They're based just a few miles from where I am in Devon, but they're a global website; they've got a big reach. It's been really cool working with those guys and we're both developing a business together, really. It's been good.

George: When you produced your first DVD did they help you market it to their current customer base?

Martin: They knew that there was demand for it from their customer base. That spurred me on to make a video because I knew that people were going to buy it. Obviously, it's still a lot of time and effort and commitment to put into a project, so you're still thinking, "Oh, I hope someone does like it, and I hope someone buys it".

"We started doing digital versions last year, in November, and it has given the videos a really good lease of life. People can download them anywhere now."

George: I know that feeling well.

Martin: I think that's one of the big things – just going for it and giving it a shot. Thinking you might fail probably puts a lot of people off, so you've just got to commit and go for it. That first video has been super popular and it still sells really well now. It's been nice to open up into the digital world as well. It's really, really given the videos a new lease of life.

George: When you started to go digital, how many products did you have?

Martin: 110% Surfing Techniques Volume 1 and Volume 2 were our main sellers. We had a couple other DVDs as well. The first thing we did was make Volume 1 and Volume 2 available as a download. We then did a marketing campaign with Magicseaweed – it was material that was 4-6 years old, but it was now available as a download, so that gave us a really good boost. At the same time I was finishing 110% Surfing Techniques Volume 3, which is all new material. It meant we had this instant hit with the Volume 3 download because we already had had a bit of time playing with it, getting used to setting up the site and working with digital downloads. When the big release came for Volume 3, we were set up. We felt comfortable with it all and confident that it was all going to work.

George: How long does it take you to make one of these videos?

Martin: It's quite a long process. The actual movie is 60 minutes – a good, solid lot of content. We also do a flip version of it. In surfing, you have different stances, so usually my right foot is at the back of the board. There's goofy foot though, which is left foot at the back. I flip the screen so when you're watching, you can relate to it yourself. In terms of how long it takes, we go out filming in different places around the world as well as locally in Devon. We shoot in France, Australia, Hawaii, New Zealand, places like that, to get some different looks and see good surfers.

George: Do you star in the videos yourself or do you get other people to do that and you're just instructing?

Martin: My main role is to get the tips and produce it, but, especially in the early days, my wife Annika would film and I'd surf. I still do that – it's a bit of a mixture, really. It's a bit of me, other people re-enacting stuff, trying to mix it up a bit. Especially this recent one, there's some technical bits and some news footage. It's all good. Getting people to film is usually pretty tricky, so it works out better financially for me to film as well.

George: How do you go about arranging a shoot?

Martin: I get together a shot list, and then look at specific bits I want to film and what angles I'll use. Then it all starts to fall into place. I'm not trained in all this though. I've picked up tips from friends. It's fun learning new stuff like what platforms to use and how you can work things out. Then I spend loads of time editing. That's hard. I get pretty frazzled.

George: You said you go to places like Australia and France to film. Is that because there's better waves there, there's some people you want to see, or you want to have some fun?

Martin: I guess a bit of everything. I'll do a lot of it at home. I generally go to where there's going to be some good surfers, so if there's a big contest on in France, Australia, or what have you, I'll go there because there's more chance of seeing some top guys out surfing. Hopefully, if there's some good guys out, I can get some good footage. Then I just line up with a couple of local guys and get some footage of them.

George: Do you have to ask to film them or is it fair play that you record them and use that?

Martin: A lot of time I just walk up to the beach and film. It's like taking a photo, really. Just taking the shots, generally earning the rights to it. I buy content off other videographers as well. I was missing a few airs that I needed for Volume 3 so I just bought some clips. For other stuff, I'll be working more closely with surfers, so we'll hook up and just try certain angles I'm looking for, and work a bit more with shot lists.

George: How do you distinguish yourself from other people providing instructional surfing videos?

Martin: There's a lot of YouTube kind of stuff, but there's nothing really out there that competes with us, with the amount of work we put into the videos. To go out and do a 60 minute instructional video with different angles and lots of tips takes a lot of work. We got a little niche market. Considering it's a world-wide market, it's quite surprising, really.

George: I assumed there'd be loads of people lying on the beach coming up with this idea?

Martin: Lots of people are really good surfers, lots are really good instructors, and lots are really good actors, but it's just putting it all together and having the time as well that's hard. I have a lot of time in the winter when the surf school is quiet to do these things. Although with the DVDs and downloads at least I wake up in the morning and I can see the sales we've make all through the night because it's summertime somewhere.

George: How do people find and buy from your website?

Martin: Our main marketing tool is to give Magicseaweed free content. That way they get some good content exclusively and it works for us because the only place you can download our movie is actually off our website. If people want to buy it instantaneously and not buy a DVD, they come straight to our site. We also started a YouTube channel in November and we've got 4,000 subscribers now.

George: Do you use any other social media like Facebook and Twitter, or is it just mainly YouTube?

Martin: I thought Facebook would be a real good one, but YouTube seems to be getting the most views and subscribers. I thought it would be the other way around, but I guess it is video content. We have got Twitter, but it's just linked up with our Facebook. We've got Instagram as well. All those things are quite hard because you have to do things quite regularly. It's like a job in itself. I'd rather just be producing stuff. My wife does a bit of social media and a bit of marketing and stuff. People do seem to find us eventually!

George: What have you got in the pipeline at the moment?

Martin: I did an interactive game, like a DVD game, which I was really, really chuffed with but it didn't sell very well – so I'm trying to keep to what I know works. We've got 110% Volume 4 in the pipeline, which I've started writing. I haven't started to film yet. We're also going to do a longboarding video this winter. It's not going to be as big as the 110% ones. It's going to be a bit of a sneaky one to get out there before the Volume 4. It takes a lot of work so I don't want to rush things. Because each one's got to be better, yeah? That's the hardest bit: making the next video better. I don't want to just produce stuff to get it out there. It's got to be good and it's got to be better than the last one. That's my aim.

"That's the hardest bit: making the next video better. I don't want to just produce stuff to get it out there. It's got to be good and it's got to be better than the last one."

George: That's great general advice for life as well.

Martin: Yeah, and it's about me enjoying it as well. It's got to be fun because at the end of the day, I've got another business that takes up a lot of time and energy. When I'm doing this, I've got to be motivated.

George: Martin, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. If listeners want to learn to surf or to see one of your videos or come down to visit you, where can they find you online?

Martin: All the downloads and DVDs, including 110% Surfing Techniques, are on surftechniques.com. If you want to come and learn to surf or improve your surfing visit us in Devon. We're at Bigbury and it's Discovery Surf School – discoverysurf.com.

Welcome to our new checkout!

2014-07-10T00:00:00Z

After months of hard work by our team, we're happy to announce the launch of our shiny new checkout. We're very pleased with it. We hope you are too. You'll find a clean, modern design, a slimmed down buyer experience, and more control over the buying process for you as a seller.

Modern design

The shopping cart now has a stylish new design that your customers will love. Every screen is as simple and usable as possible, while buttons have been redesigned to make them look delightfully clickable.

Key new features

Slimmed down buyer experience

Your customer will now only see the information that really matters: the name of the product they are buying, the quantity and the total price (and whole numbers won't show unnecessary units).

Customers will then only need to provide an email, card number, expiry date and cvc to buy a product from your site. How simple is that? The whole buying experience can take less than two minutes.

All pages are also now properly responsive, so your buyers will have a seamless experience no matter what device they are using.

Of course, if you need to add more details to the checkout such as the country, buyer name or address you can do.

Seamless buyer experience

You can now checkout everything on your own website, rather than just the cart, meaning that the buyer experience is as seamless as possible. You can even allow downloads on your own website, if you want to.

If you have already been using the cart instead of Instant Buy you'll be able to checkout on your own website immediately. If you've been using Instant Buy you'll need to add this Javascript code to your page (you can add this anywhere now - it no longer needs to be in the header):

More control over the buying process for you

We've added a new settings page for the shopping cart so you have as much control over the process as you need. Your logo will appear at the top of each page in the buying process as standard, but there is also a greater degree of customisation for you to play with. For example, you also have the option of entering your own CSS.

We've also added extra features like a 'download all' button if your buyers decide to purchase more than one file and additional functionality previously only available in the cart, for example EULA and EU tax is now available via Instant Buy.

One goodbye

We've added a lot of new functionality in this release but we've also decided to wave goodbye to the PayMill and SagePay payment gateways due to low demand. Sellers that were using these gateways were notified months ago and we've helped them move to new gateways.

What do I need to do now?

Nothing! You'll have been automatically migrated to the new design so you don't have to do anything – apart from appreciate the improved buyer experience!

Top 10 mistakes made by ebook authors

2014-07-08T00:00:00Z

Editor and literary consultant Claire Wingfield has helped writers all around the world to publish their books. She is also the author of 52 Dates for Writers, an ebook designed to helped writers unlease their creativity. In this blog post, written in conjunction with SendOwl, she outlines the 10 biggest mistakes made by ebook writers – and how to avoid them.

Mistake number 1: Trying to do it all yourself

You've written your book, but now you need to edit it, proofread it, typeset it and design a cover. Even if you're on a tight budget, don't try to do all this yourself. Your book won't sell well or get good reviews if grammatical mistakes have slipped in or your ending is self-indulgent. Find a professional to edit and proofread your work. You're too close to your work to be an effective editor and proofreader, even if this is your day job. These days, it’s possible to do your own cover design, typesetting and marketing to a decent standard. Just be honest with yourself about whether you are any good at these things and know enough about them. For example, you need to design a book cover that looks good as a thumbnail image as well as at a larger size. If you have the budget, it's worth outsourcing design and typesetting to a professional. This will save you time and should increase sales. Another option is to consider launching your book on a tight budget and reinvesting profits in a new edition of your work that has additional content but also a more professional-looking design.

Mistake number 2: Being too late with your market research

Don't just do market research as you're launching your book. You don't want any unwelcome surprises, such as suddenly discovering that another author has the same name or book title as you. If you discover issues like these early on you can take action – like using your middle name or a pseudonym and changing your book title. Early stage research also means you can ensure there is a demand for your book, which will also be useful when you come to marketing it. This is true even for fiction. Ask yourself: Who is your target market? What are they reading at the moment? Where do they buy this kind of book? Why might they read yours?

Mistake number 3: Launching cold

It's easy to think "I've finished my book. That's all the hard work done." Sadly, this isn't true. It's just as much hard work to promote your book, and this is something you should be doing even before you launch. Can you let your readers into the writing and publishing process at an early stage? This will help you build interest and demand for your ebook. It will also mean that you can build an email list that you can use when you finally launch your ebook. After all, what could be nicer than mailing out to already-interested people on your launch day and watching your sales figures climb?

Mistake number 4: Being too shy or scared to ask for reviews

If anybody emails or tweets you to say something nice about your book, ask them to write an online review. This is particularly important at an early stage, when initial reviews can really influence whether someone buys your book or not. Early reviews can also affect what other reviewers might say. It's more difficult to rate a book as 2* when everyone else loves it. You should build a reviews strategy into your product launch. Make a list of people you want to review your book and consider sending them a (free) copy. Don't panic if you get the odd bad review. These can add authenticity and show that it's not just your friends and family reviewing your book! Trust that you've written a good book that your target audience will love. If you have any doubts about your book's quality, refer to mistake number 1 and find yourself a good editor!

Mistake number 5: Forgetting traditional marketing methods

Just because you're publishing an ebook, doesn't mean that you just need to exclusively market it using social media. Traditional marketing methods can still be effective. If there's a magazine that your target audience reads, for example, work out how you can appear in it. Consider giving a talk or workshop at your local library, book festival or book group. You don't even have to read from your book. Sometimes you're more likely to be given publicity opportunities if you're willing to talk about a related topic: so if you've written a work of fiction with tarot reading as a theme you could talk about this, for example. So long as you position yourself as someone who is interested and enthusiastic about an area connected to your ebook, and willing to talk about it in an accessible way, people will listen to you. Afterwards, you can tell them all about your book.

Mistake number 6: Making it all about you

You've been so absorbed in your work that it's easy to get into the mindset of telling everyone you meet what your book is about and why it's so great. This is good to an extent, because your enthusiasm will be infectious. However, don't miss out on the chance to learn what other people think about your book. Claire's readers gave her some great ideas about how to describe and market her book 52 Dates for Writers. They told her what they found useful and what particularly appealed to them – information which she could then use to more effectively promote the book to her target audience.

Mistake number 7: Becoming overwhelmed by social media

Plan simple targets that you can stick to, for example, promoting two blog posts a month on Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads. It's more important to consistently engage with social media than to launch with a flurry of activity and then produce only a dribble of content as the months go by. Getting traction on social media can take time so don't panic if you don't immediately get lots of followers or likes. Also, remember that social media is about being social! When Claire was marketing her book 52 Dates for Writers she baked in the idea of community to her marketing plan by getting people to share with her – and her followers – writing they'd created from her book.

Mistake number 8: Having a sloppy sales page

You're reaching the end of your ebook project and you're anxious to move on to the selling stage. But hold your horses! There's no point investing valuable time in promoting your ebook, only to put people off when they arrive at your sales page to find unclear copy, grammatical mistakes and a dodgy author photo. Leave enough time to do this part of the project justice. Consider asking your editor to work on both your book and your publicity material – it shouldn't add too much to the cost of the project if you factor it in at the beginning. Employ a professional photographer or talented friend to take a good author photo.

Mistake number 9: Not selling on enough platforms

It's easy to stop at Amazon. However, aim to sell on a number of platforms: perhaps Amazon, Kobo and Apple. That way, you'll have access to more potential customers. Keep your mind open to fresh opportunities also – epublishing is still a developing market; tomorrow’s players may be entirely different and it’s the early adopters who will benefit from keeping abreast of new routes to market. And don't forget to launch on your own website or blog! Middlemen like Amazon take a sizeable cut of your profits and only let you formuate your content in a certain way. If you sell direct to readers you'll make more on each sale and be able to optimise your marketing copy. Of course, sorting out payment options and delivering digital files securely and automatically to your readers isn't all that easy – which is where SendOwl comes in. We make it easy for you to sell ebooks online direct from your website, blog, or through social media using a short link.

Mistake number 10: Taking too long to write your next ebook

You probably think you deserve a well-earned break after launching your ebook, but don't take too much of a holiday! Keep in contact with your readership and don't keep them waiting too long for your next ebook, whether this is the next in the series or something different. Also consider whether you can launch other digital products to complement your ebooks. Can you offer a webinar or an online course on a subject that you write about, for example?

Thanks to Claire for helping out with this post. You can find out more about her, her new book and her literary consultancy on her website: clairewingfield.co.uk

If you’d like to sell your ebooks online come join us at SendOwl. We have PDF stamping, secure and automatic delivery, discount codes and many other features you need to maximise your sales.

How to make money as an artist

2014-07-01T00:00:00Z

Fifteen years ago Ann Kullberg was a struggling artist with a handicapped son to care for. Today, she is the driving force behind the website annkullberg.com, which sells webinars, subscriptions, books and kits about coloured pencil artwork worldwide. She tells us her inspiring story.

George: How did you become an artist?

Ann: Well, because of circumstances. I had two small children. I was divorced. My son was very, very handicapped and ill. I had to work from home. I discovered coloured pencil as a fine art medium about the same time I needed to work from home. I exhibited one piece of work at a local fair and got first place. Then I just kind of dived in, got gallery representation and managed to eek out some sort of living for a while. Eventually, I started taking commissions for portraits.

George: Do you think your art career would have happened anyway, without such a specific set of circumstances?

Ann: I had always drawn as a child but I had never taken any art classes. I was always intimidated by them. I thought you had to be a good artist to take an art class. I didn't feel I was talented. I'm completely self taught. I always credit my son [for my career] because without him, I would certainly not be talking to you today.

George: It's always great to hear such an inspirational story

Ann: My life has really turned out in ways I would never have imagined.

George: How did you go from doing commissions and exhibiting work to starting a website?

Ann: I was asked by someone writing a book about their technique in coloured pencil to write a chapter for the book. He didn't do portraits. The publisher of his book saw my work, liked it and asked me if I would write a book on portrait techniques in coloured pencil. That was just unreal. I mean, at that point I'd been working commissions for about eleven years but coloured pencil is really slow. A portrait takes about 120 hours to complete.

George: Wow. That's four weeks!

Ann: Yes, and I had to get two done a month to cover the bills. I had sixty hour work weeks. For eleven years I'd been working in coloured pencil but really, really, really struggling financially. When they offered me the book, I just went crazy. I also decided I'd better have a website – this was fifteen years ago. I knew nothing about it. I mean nothing about it. My daughter told me it would be really easy to have a website. It seemed as though she lied to me! It was not easy to make a website if you knew nothing. However, it was a great thing because after the book was published, lots and lots of people visited my website and then I started a magazine because people wanted to learn online. That was sort of the beginning.

"I think the main ingredient for success is hanging in there; just not quitting."

George: Then you created an online magazine. You actually sold it at that point?

Ann: Yes, I sold it right away. I wrote to people who had sent me fan mail because of the book – about two hundred people. I think I charged $2.50 a month and charged for a year of subscription at once. I had fifty cheques in a couple of weeks. I thought, "These people must be wanting this." Really, fifteen years ago, there weren't many people online.

George: Where did you go from there?

Ann: I realised that now I had this following I could probably sell them stuff. I starting putting these tutorial kits together. Well, those just flew off the shelves! We would print and package them here. People really loved them. We just kept going. I think we must have close to forty kits now and a whole bunch of other products that I created over the years as I thought, "Oh, there's a need for this". I just turned my living room into an office manufacturing area and studio.

George: Wow. Great. You now sell by Shopify and use SendOwl to sell your digital products – kits, magazine subscriptions and so on. How did you end up using Shopify?

Ann: After Frontpage, I moved to Dreamweaver, but I had to build the website myself and do absolutely everything myself. I realised just last year that I couldn't continue to maintain that. I shopped around for something that would make my life a little bit easier. I went with Shopify but then realised they would not be able to deliver digital products, which I knew was going to be another way that I moved the business forward because people can download them so easily. Then I just fell in love with the Shopify apps. I'm like, "Wow, I can do this. I can do that. Or they can do this for me." The number one thing was that I needed to have an app to handle the magazine subscriptions. For the previous fouteen years, we'd been manually adding people to different email lists, depending on what kind of subscription they had, which basically meant tons of mistakes. I thought, well, Shopify works and I could see that SendOwl was beautiful. I just love how simple SendOwl is.

George: Good stuff. So now you sell a magazine from your website, as well as kits?

Ann: Yes, after the initial five or six kits that I did myself, I realised, "I don't want to just teach what I do because everybody does coloured pencil a little differently depending on the surface and their subject matter and their personality." Then I started hiring other people to create kits for us. Now we have other people writing kits for annkullberg.com

George: How do you decide what kits to create?

Ann: I probably could work that out better. I see something I think is really pretty or really interesting that we don't have a kit on. I contact that artist and say, "Wow, this is really nice stuff. Want to make a kit for us?" That's it. It's all need based. I'm also really connected within the coloured pencil world because I'm teaching all the time. I hear what people want and I can see what sells. It's mostly just me seeing something and saying, "Wow, this would be nice".

George: Tell us a little bit about your teaching then. Does that work into the website or is it a completely different sideline?

Ann: Well, it does work into the website now because of the webinars. Until last year I taught three to five day workshops around the country. I've taught forty-four states now. Also Japan and Mexico and Canada and the UK. But I'm getting older and travel is getting a little bit less fun. We started the webinars on my own personal technique in February and that has been a really great product for us.

George: That's brilliant. You've taken your creative skill and found several different avenues to monetise it: a magazine, kits, workshops, webinars. Now, you've even built a team around it. That's brilliant going.

Ann: Well, I think that artists do have a little bit of trouble monetising their skills. We are not known for liking our numbers! I think at some point, a few years into the website, I realised that I was finding opportunities to make money all of the time. If I could only have had six of me, I'd be doing a lot better! It seemed like a switch turned on. Instead of just thinking of it as art and people liking it, I started thinking about sharing my talent, my techniques and other people's techniques, teaching – and that there's all kinds of ways to make money with art. You just have to have that switch turned on.

George: I think there's a perception that you have to be ridiculously intelligent like Warren Buffet or Richard Branson to be a business person, but really all you need to be is half sensible. If you can start spotting the patterns of what people ask for then you'll find business opportunities.

Ann: I see them absolutely everywhere now! If you can figure out a way to give people what they want, I think that's the key: knowing something, having an idea that people want, and then it's so much fun to find ways to get it to them.

"It seemed like a switch turned on. Instead of just thinking of it as art and people liking it, I started thinking about sharing my talent, my techniques."

George: So how do you market your products?

Ann: Well, that's a hard one. I've been online for so darn long, fifteen years, that there are all these back links. I've written three books and I've just published two more books that are compilation books of coloured pencil work from around the world. I'm on Amazon. I'm on North Light, which is a big publisher here in the US for art. I've just been online for so long that coloured pencil instruction and Ann Kullberg are synonymous.

George: That's great. That's where you won.

Ann: Yeah. It is. I also think the main ingredient for success is hanging in there; just not quitting.

George: Even when things are changing so fast. Are you on social media?

Ann: Yes. I can't do my own Facebook anymore but I have somebody publishing three posts a week. I've got a Twitter account. I don't know if we have Instagram or not. I'm not terrific at that because what I really love is creating new products and just figuring out what's the next big thing. Of course I use MailChimp. I've got about eight thousand people on the list. We send out emails twice a month and let people know what's new or what they can save money on.

George: Cool. What's next then?

Ann: I'm going to continue with the webinar series. We've done two and I've got a third one coming up. Having a business as tiny as mine, I can wake up in the morning and decide we're going to have a free shipping Friday and in an hour we've got a free shipping Friday. All my new stuff just happens. I can be on a plane and think, "You know what we should do," and a couple of weeks later we do it. I'm not much of a ... this is going to sound terrible, I'm not much of a goal setter. I'm more of a ride the wind.

George: I think you've got so many advantages by being small. You can, as you say, just wake up and decide to do something on your site and it's there in an hour. At SendOwl we perform several experiments in terms of features. We just didn't know if subscriptions was going to fly, for example, so we put it out for a month and ended up with one hundred and fifty subscriptions. I said to myself, "Okay, there was quite a lot of demand for that.

Ann: That's really right. I love that. I try something, it doesn't work, oh well, it just goes away.

George: Brilliant. Ann, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. If people wanted to find out more about you and coloured pencil art where would they find you online?

Ann: They would find me at annkullberg.com.

Manage your SendOwl account while on holiday

2014-06-27T00:00:00Z

In this blog post we'll have a look at how you can manage your SendOwl account while you're on holiday. We'll cover how you can prepare for your holiday, how you can ensure your holiday doesn't turn into just another week at the office and how you can keep that holiday feeling when you get home.

Automatic digital delivery

The good news is that once you've uploaded your digital product to SendOwl and put a button on your website then we do the rest – guide customers through the payment process and securely deliver your digital product. This means that when you are on holiday, all you really need to do is to check your weekly sales summary and pore yourself an extra pina colada. However, despite our best efforts, you'll probably still have some admin work that needs doing or at least delegating.

Before going on holiday

Check that you'll have wifi

If you know that you'll need to do some admin work – or perhaps just be available in case of an emergency – make sure that your hotel, rented room or appartment has wifi and whether this is free or not. If it doesn't look like you'll have wifi, consider taking a usb dongel as a backup. Don't assume you can just use your 3G or 4G data connection on your phone. Even if this is possible, roaming charges are usually extortionate. If you want to use your phone abroad then consider getting a pre-paid local SIM, although you'll need an unlocked phone for this to work.

Agree ground rules with fellow team members

If you have team members, then make sure they know when they can contact you and when they should leave you alone. Also, agree on a division of labour beforehand. Above all, be realistic. It's all too easy, especially as your holiday gets closer and work continues to pile up, to say "I'll just do a bit on holiday." If you do, you'll feel annoyed that you're missing out on valuable wind surfing time. If you don't, you'll worry that your slacking might have a negative inpact on your business.

Revisit your editorial calendar

In the week leading up to your holiday, have another look at your editorial calendar. Make sure you haven't inadvertently scheduled product launches or key advertising campaigns for when you're away. In terms of content marketing, either draft content beforehand or accept that your customers might be able to cope for a week without reading a new blog post. In terms of social media, you can schedule tweets and posts. You might need to ask another team member to be available to respond to customer support requests on social media though – or do this yourself (see next section).

Consider using our inbuilt affiliates scheme

We’ve created an inbuilt affiliate system to make it easy for other people to sell your digital products in exchange for a pre-arranged commission. We handle all the complex stuff (like tracking, reporting and administration). All you need to do is find the people best suited to selling your digital products. And of course the advantage if that when you're on holiday, your affiliates are still actively promoting and selling your products. Wohoot!

Sign up for weekly sales summaries

If you've not already, sign up for SendOwl weekly sales summaries, delivered straight to your inbox. This way you can quickly see how much you're selling – and whether that extra scuba diving trip can be justified!

While on holiday

Relax!

Yep, this is the single most important thing you can do. Running your own business can feel like being permanently strapped to a roller coaster. Just for a short while, allow yourself to unwind.

Batch all your admin work

If you can't get away from doing some work, then make sure you allocate yourself a set amount of time per day – say an hour in the morning – to get it all out of the way. Don't be tempted to keep checking in.

Getting back from holiday

Write lists

Don't spoil your holiday mood by getting back and instantly worrying about how much stuff you need to do. Take a deep breath, unpack, put your dirty laundry in the washing machine, and write down what you need to do – whether this is ordering groceries, ringing your mum, or emailing someone at work. Every time you think of something you need to do write it down and then stop worrying about it. The next day, when you're properly in back home mode, you can then simply look at your 'to do' lists and prioritise.

Inflict holiday photos on your nearest and dearest

No holiday is complete unless you make your nearest and dearest admire photos of you smugly smiling into the camera while relaxing on a beach/hiking up a mountain/exploring Nabataean ruins.

Do Something Impossible!

2014-06-12T00:00:00Z

Joel Runyon, founder of Impossible and the Ultimate Paleo Guide, tells us how he turned his blog – read by just his mum – into a succesful business selling ebooks and videos. He shares with us his thoughts on how to choose a winning product, how to launch it and how to market it.

George: Joel, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Joel: The main site that I run is called Impossible. It's focused on pushing your limits and doing the impossible in three main areas: fitness, business and mindset, or something I call 'gritness' – sort of teaching yourself to be more resilient. I also have another site called Ultimate Paleo Guide. We have recipes, articles, interviews, all sort of stuff that we bring to people on a weekly basis about Paleo [The paleo diet is a focus on eating natural, real food which is widely available with little or no processing].

George: So how did you get started with Impossible?

Joel: It started off because I graduated from school and I couldn’t get a job and I was just sitting around. I think I sat around for nine months after graduating. You're reading Chris Guillebeau; he's travelling every country in the world. You have no money; you can't travel. There's people starting their own businesses. You have no ideas. You can't even get a job anywhere. There's no way you could start a business. Then, I decided I was just over it. Basically the idea with the blog was I had a list of things I wanted to do, but they all seemed impossible. I wanted to start doing some of them. I couldn’t travel the world because I had no money. I couldn’t get a job at Starbucks. What could I do? The answer to that was I could run a triathlon. I didn’t know much about it, but I figured I could get outside my house and run around the block. I could get outside my house and jump on my bike and ride around the block. So I finished my first triathlon and realised that if I thought it was impossible, and I was able to do it, what else could I do? I started trying to extend that same type of mentality to other adventures. Over time it grew into a blog that people read, which then turned out to have a business side.

George: Did you write in advance that you were going to go and do these challenges?

Joel: I had this list of things I was going to do and I was going to write about it. The public just forced me to go do them. That's where it started and that's how it started to grow. I was at a point where a lot of things seemed pretty impossible though. After you get rejected or ignored by Starbucks enough times in a row it starts doing things to your ego. It doesn’t feel too good.

George: What was the most impossible challenge that you’ve done?

Joel: We built a school with Pencils of Promise – we needed to raise $26,000. I was meant to run an ultramarathon for it and I'd never run an ultra before; in fact, before I started the blog, I'd never ran more than three miles. I think the school fundraising aspect of it was almost the more intimidating goal though.

George: Where was the school?

Joel: In Guatemala. We started in June 2012 or so and finished raising the funds in January 2013. Then we went to visit the school this time last year; it's in a little town out in the country. It was pretty cool to actually go down there and see it and see the kids that were studying there.

George: Was the fear of failure on that one quite high?

Joel: It was definitely pretty intimidating starting out and saying 'this is what we’re going to do' and then making it happen and rallying people around. However, the thing I like about the goals and the metrics that we had for this project is they were very measureable. You could tell if the project was a success or a failure. It's almost better to fail than it is to not know that you failed or just float around in no man’s land.

George: Good work. So you’ve really grown Impossible in the past few years. Then, you started monetising it. Can you explain how you went about doing that?

Joel: I finally got an entry level job at a marketing agency and used that time to learn as much as I could. I ended up moving up the ranks pretty quickly, getting recruited at a couple of different agencies, doing quite a bit of different work with different companies. All along I was doing the blog outside my nine to five job. It was an impetus for me to do interesting things. I wasn’t really making any money off the blog at this point, but I was probably making $1,000 a month or $1,200 a month helping clients on the side with their marketing. I said to myself, 'okay, I'm going to figure out how to make more than $1,200 a month'. I focused more on monetising the site, growing the blog a bit more proactively. It wasn’t something that happened right away. I'd already launched the product on triathlons and it sort of bombed. I just kept trying stuff, kept trying to figure out what people were interested in, what they wanted to talk about. I ended up doing this one case study on myself about getting six-pack abs. It turns out there's a lot of interest in that. I basically reverse engineered the process I'd followed and then shared it with people in a product. That was one of the first successful products we had; it was called Impossible Abs.

George: It sounds like you learnt a lot from the first product launch?

Joel: What I learned from the first launch was that there's a lot of barriers to entry for triathlons. You have to have way more gear; you have to have more experience. I needed to learn that just because I wanted to make something didn't mean people were going to buy it. I needed to find something that I wanted to write about, that was useful and that people were interested in. That’s a basic concept of business.

George: That's good advice.

Joel: You have to sell something that people want. Obviously I was doing marketing for clients and so I knew these principals in my head. But then, you start doing it for yourself and you make all sorts of exceptions. It was something that I had to realise for myself. It wasn't that the triathalon product didn't sell, but it just appealed to a very small segment of my audience. If I wanted to make a product and sell it to a majority of my audience then I was going to have to be a bit more strategic about it.

George: Sure. So you did the abs product; that was a big success. Where did you go from there?

Joel: We actually have a couple of products about to launch. We have a follow up product on strength building and a nutritional protocol on gaining weight quickly that we've been getting a lot of questions about; hopefully, they're going to be coming out in the next couple of months. After the Impossible Abs product I was also getting a lot of questions about Paleo because Impossible Abs is like a Paleo-based intermittent fasting protocol. I got tired of answering all the questions over and over by email, so I made a site called ultimatepaleoguide.com where I answered all these questions. Over time the site started to blow up and it became its own little entity. We actually have another SendOwl account for it now.

George: Was there a reason you went for a different brand?

Joel: I just decided at the time; it wasn't particularly a conscious decision. If I were to do it differently, I would call it Impossible Paleo or something like that – I should go buy that domain name because it's awesome!

George: Yeah, you should! A lot of your success seems to have come from having quite a big following online. How did you go about building that following?

Joel: Mostly it's just been brute force! It's been four years I think since I started my blog and for the first six to twelve months pretty much no one read it: maybe my mom, which was nice of her, and a few other people. I reached out to some other people, but there wasn’t a lot of natural, organic traffic come in or anything else happening. It started to change when I began doing stuff: I started to write about myself in a way that helped others. If all I talked about was just me, me, me, me and the things that I want to do that's great, but nobody’s ever going to read it, because nobody really cares about you. That sounds harsh, but it's true. They care about how you can help them. If you don’t frame your experiences in a way that other people can relate to or get something out of then there's really no reason for you to be writing outside of a journal. For me, it just came down to the realisation that I needed to be helping people and answering questions that they had. When that happened business got way easier. A lot of people who get into blogging think they can't do products, but with Impossible Abs we had a guy lose eighty pounds and reverse his diabetes on it. If you create products that actually help people a lot of times they do the marketing for you.

George: That brings me to my next question. You’ve come up with a product, Impossible Abs say, how do you go about marketing it?

Joel: I don’t have the launch plan right in front of me, but we put out a lot of teasers beforehand. The fact that I had done a case study about myself was also pretty compelling. That was a popular post in general and generated a bunch of incoming interest as well. I did quite a few guest posts on top of that. Then, we just launched it and it took on a life of its own.

George: Joel, it's been a pleasure talking to you. If people want to find out more about you and read more of your stuff where should they head?

Joel: Check out Impossible HQ for everything impossible. Then, if you're interested in the Paleo world, check out Ultimate Paleo Guide. We've got a couple hundred recipes on the site and about three hundred articles. It's a pretty massive resource.

Get Your Account For Free

2014-05-20T00:00:00Z

If you get someone to sign up to SendOwl we'll give you 20% of whichever plan they choose for as long as they continue to be a SendOwl seller. This means that if someone signs up for our most popular plan – $24 a month – then you'll receive $4.80 a month off your SendOwl account. Sign up 5 people to Sendowl and – wohoot! – you pay nothing for your own $24 account.

A little thank you present from us

We've been really happy with all your emails and tweets about how much you like SendOwl. Thanks! A special mention goes to Magda Pecsenye who tweeted:

You know who gives amazing customer service? @SendOwlHQ I wish they could run my entire life, their customer service is so good.
— Magda Pecsenye (@AskMoxie) March 25, 2014

Well, sadly we can't run your entire life, but we can help you sell your digital products online as easily and cheaply as possible. And if you manage to persuade someone to become a SendOwl seller – because you like what we do – then we'll make it even cheaper for you to sell online, even free! Think of it as a little thank you present from us.

How does your referral scheme work?

Just follow 4 simple steps:

Go to 'Settings' and then 'Profile'. Select the link called 'Referral identifier'.
Enter your brand name – or any other identifier in the 'referral identifier' box. Press update.
We create a personalised url for you.
You send this to people: if they sign up within 90 days you get 20% of the price of their subscription. Wohoot!

How often do I get paid?

On the 7th of every month.

What if I persuade loads of people to sign up?

Then SendOwl will descend from his perch and give you a (gentle) peck on the cheek. He will also keep giving you 20% of whichever plan people choose for as long as they continue to be a SendOwl seller – so you can actually make money by telling other people about SendOwl!

How do I found out more about the referral scheme?

Go to the How the SendOwl referral scheme works knowledge base article for a more detailed explanation.

Gaming company Introversion Software has made $1.5 million through SendOwl

2014-05-12T00:00:00Z

Introversion Software was founded back in 1997 when four guys met at university. Fast forward a few years, and Introversion has five games under its belt, the last of which, Prison Architect, has been hugely successful. Managing director Mark Morris tells me where they find their inspiration, how they marketed their games and why he’s been blown away by the power of the internet.

SendOwl: Mark, could you tell us a bit about yourself, your company and your most recent — and incredible successful — new game, Prison Architect?

Mark: Yes, sure. We're a very small team. There are only four of us full time. We met back in 1997 at Imperial College, and one of the four of us was a big video game player and, it turned out, a creator of games. He made a hacking game called Uplink. Toward the end of university, back in about 2001, we decided that we would have a crack at selling Uplink for profit. That's exactly what we did. We made enough to make a second game, a game called Darwinia. That did okay, and we made a third game called DEFCON, which did very well, and then a fourth game called Multiwinia.

The last game that we released, and that we're still working on now, is a game called Prison Architect, which is all about building and managing a maximum security prison. We released that in a very early Alpha stage back in September 2012 through SendOwl. We've been amazed with the success and the interest in the game. Just looking at the stats now, we've made nearly $1.5m through SendOwl. We've been absolutely blown away.

SendOwl: Wow. $1.5m for a team of four, did you say?

Mark: Well, four, yes, but credit where it's due. There are quite a few freelancers involved now. We've got a sound guy, other programmers, an art guy and a writer. We've been able to expand the team to correspond to the interest within the game.

SendOwl: Okay. I've got to ask. What was the inspiration for the game? You're sat around building a prison. How did you come up with the idea?

Mark: It was born from a failed project called Subversion, which is another game that we were working on for a while, which was all about hi-tech heists in a city. We'd written some code to automatically create cities and one of the missions that we were working on, within this kind of world, was breaking somebody out of a prison. Chris was struggling with this game as a whole, and he took a couple of weeks off. He went to San Francisco with his wife and went to Alcatraz and looked around; he just looked at the systematic way in which a prison operates. For example, it had all these big levers that you could pull and it would open all of the doors at the same time. He thought: "This is very amenable to a computer simulation. It's something that we could look into.”

SendOwl: How long did you spend developing this game before you actually got to the launch?

Mark: We were in development for about a year, but we were really trying to understand how best to launch the game. In the games industry things changed a lot in 2010-2012. A company called Humble Bundle had started introducing pay what you want for bundles of Indie games, so you could pay as little as a cent. Contrary to what everybody thought would happen, people paid around $5-6 in their hundreds or thousands, so these bundles were making millions of dollars. There was also Kickstarter.

SendOwl: But you didn’t go for Kickstarter?

Mark: The two questions they ask you – How much money do you need for this project? How long do you want to run your campaign for? – were ones that we didn't want to answer. But we thought, "People understand Kickstarter. They understand this idea of asking for money in order to make a product a reality." We're not going to limit how much we're asking for and we're not going to set a time limit because if we don't achieve it, we can continue to develop the game. After a good few months of Googling, I eventually found you guys, and we launched our Kickstarter-inspired website.

SendOwl: So how do you go about getting the initial publicity to get this snowball rolling?

Mark: We had been in the industry for quite a while, so we had a relatively good list of journalists that we could reach out to, but actually, if I'm being completely honest, we were a bit nervous because we didn't know how well this was going to do at all. We didn't want to do a big press release, a big push, because we thought, "If this fails, we're going to look like complete clouts". We only told about five or six journalists in the UK, something like that, on big VA gaming sites, but not many. Rock, Paper, Shotgun was one. PC Gamer. I think PC Games; I can't remember the exact list, but it wasn't many at all because we just wanted to dip our toe in the water. We sold something like $100,000 worth in about the first three days, so we were absolutely blown away and astonished by it – by the power of the internet.

SendOwl: Was there a few beers had that evening?

Mark: There were beers, but there were also a lot of coding going on at the same time because we were not set up to deal with that kind of load – which is never a good mix.

SendOwl: You also sell from a platform called Steam. Can you explain what that is? I'm sure a lot of people will be interested.

Mark: I describe it to the layman as sort of like the iTunes of PC/Mac/Linux video gaming. Steam provides curation of your catalogue of games, so once you've bought a game on Steam, it keeps a record that you've bought that game. You don't need to worry about actually keeping track of the files themselves. It also has a number of other features: it supports achievement in-game chat and moding and marketplaces and all sorts of things. It accounts for probably 95% of PC video game sales now. App stores do very well for some casual gaming titles and obviously apps, but Valve — the company that make Steam — are basically, the go-to guys for PC, Mac and Linux gaming nowadays.

SendOwl: As well as selling through Steam, you sell through your own website using SendOwl. So why did you choose SendOwl?

Mark: SendOwl is so great for us because of the real simplicity, but flexibility, within the license key model. Each game we sell is a package and within the package there are products which are PC executable, Mac executable and the linux.tar.gz. — but there are also license keys. There's the license key for activation on Steam and also on our website we offer various customisations. If you want to pay a little bit more money, you can actually name a prisoner. You can write a prisoner's bio, a short description of why he's in prison. If you want to pay a little bit more, we'll get our artist to paint a picture of you. Customers send in a photograph of themselves and our artist actually recreates that image in a Prison Architect-style prisoner. In order to activate those functionalities we use license keys. Those license keys are embedded in SendOwl.

SendOwl: So you sell quite a few different Prison Architect packs?

Mark: That’s right. The Prison Architect base pack, which is just Prison Architect on its own, is $30. The most expensive tier that we went for was a $1,000 tier. For $1000 you can customise a warden. They were $1,000 each and we thought: "That's too much. Who is going to want to give us $1000?" We had a limit of five, and we sold six of them in about twenty minutes.

This is the key message: There are people in the world that really do want to support us in making this video game. For those people, $1,000 is obviously something they're willing to pay, so it was quite an eye-opener for us.

SendOwl: It is amazing that people will fall in love with a company. I remember once in the early days, a guy emailed and just said: "I love your platform. I've been using SendOwl for ten minutes. This is unbelievable. I've spent all day trying to find something that can do this. Can I just send you and your company some beers?" I said: "We're in the UK actually." He was like, "Don't worry, I'm going to PayPal you $50 right now. Go out and get a crate of your favorite beers for the team." We’d saved this guy a lot of hassle and he was more than happy to just send some beer our way.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. It's amazing and I think it's the world we live in. If you provide a good service to people, they can be incredibly happy with it.

SendOwl: I just want to ask you one more question before we wrap up the interview: If you could offer one piece of advice to fellow Indie gamers that are just starting out and looking to create their first game, what would it be?

Mark: People are going to think that we pre-scripted this but genuinely, I've run this business since 2001 and I'm asked that a lot! I tell people: "You need to be selling your game from your website." That is the absolute basic first thing that I would tell you to do because then you've got a revenue stream directly from customers, directly into your bank, with nobody else sat in the middle, no contracts, no legal, nothing like that. Obviously, there are contracts, but you don't need to negotiate complex publishing agreements.

If your game doesn't sell very well, you're probably making a clanger so stop and move on to something else. If it is selling well, you're going to be getting the money from that immediately with zero lag that you can use to keep yourself afloat while you go and negotiate with Valve or a publisher or whoever it is that you're going to do. It basically gives you all the options that you need to move your business forward.

I then tell people you need to go and use SendOwl: simple as that. My advice is: it doesn't matter whether you're on Steam or you've got relationships with other people. If you're not selling it from your site, start selling it from your site immediately and use SendOwl to do it.

Customise your email templates

2014-05-08T00:00:00Z

You can now fully customise all emails that go out to your customers, including the payment receipt. Probably the niftiest new feature is that you can make your order email have product specific text. So you can now say something different when someone orders, say, your ebook called Blue Owls: A Modern Phenomenon and your best-selling video game, Worm Count.

Couldn't we customise emails templates before?

Yep, but only certain emails were customisable and you could only customise certain features like product name and amount. After listening to feedback, we realised we needed to do more, so after some hard work - ta da! – you can now fully customise all your email templates.

What customisations can I now make?

As well as making simple changes to the name that appears in the inbox of the buyer and to the reply address you can change the wording of all your emails. For example, if you would like to send out a transaction receipt in another language then no problem. You just change the text. This is fairly straightforward, even if you aren't technical. Have a look at our knowledge base article for a quick guide to making these changes.

You can also make more advanced customisations such as per product emails using Liquid, a whole templating language that gives you complete flexibility over your emails' contents. We've written a quick guide to get you started. If you're not technical, this might be the point that you ask someone who is to help you out. It's not a big ask so go ahead.

Get Paid in Bitcoins!

2014-04-15T00:00:00Z

Exciting news for our SendOwl customers: you can now price your products in Bitcoins. You can then either store these in a Bitcoin wallet or convert them into the currency of your choice. Bitcoin integration has been requested by a significant number of our customers who want to tap into this growing – and lucrative – market.

Get paid by customers around the world

Bitcoins are a true child of the Internet. You can get paid by people all over the world, even from countries where credit cards are hard to come by or Paypal isn't supported. You cut out expensive merchant fees. You buy into a truly global currency that isn't manipulated by governments for political reasons. And you don't even need to weigh down your wallet with a piece of card or some crumpled bits of paper. It's all online.

Be part of the financial new wave

Although a lot of media attention has focused on how the Bitcoin economy is peopled by mystery founders, drug smugglers and the CIA, the reality is a little bit less sexy. Companies all over the world now price their products in Bitcoins, including the ecommerce retailer Overstock. According to an article in Entrepreneur magazine, Overstock "has received nearly 3,000 orders in Bitcoin, with a total value of more than $600,000" in just 20 days. High profile merchants like Shopify offer Bitcoin integration, as does payment gateway service Stripe.

SendOwl sellers have also been keen to accept orders in Bitcoin. In this article three sellers – Australian cartoonist Stuart McMillen, Introversion Software managing director Mark Morris and special effects producer Matthias Müller – explain why they started pricing their products in Bitcoins and how they see Bitcoins developing in the future

How does it work?

SendOwl works with Bitpay – a bitcoin payment processor used by Shopify – to let you get paid in Bitcoins. We've written a 'how to get paid in Bitcoins' guide that goes into a bit more detail. It's easy though. By following 4 simple steps that take about 2 minutes in total you'll be ready to earn your first Bitcoin.

Sign me up!

Not a customer but want to easily sell your creations online? Sign up to our free 30 day trial and find out how SendOwl can help you turn your passion into your business.

You're a SendOwl customer already? Good on you! Read our 'How to get paid in Bitcoins' guide.

New Merchant Interface

2014-03-11T00:00:00Z

After 4 months of development, countless revisions and probably a metric tonne of Coffee, I'm glad to announce a new merchant interface is finally live! It's been a monumental task as we've rethought, improved and polished over 50 pages that make up the area where you manage your account and add products for sale. The new interface is faster to load, more efficient to complete common tasks and has a host of new features to boot. Watch the video for a quick overview or read the details below for a deeper analysis of what's changed.

As before you end up on the dashboard after login. You'll immediately notice the new styling which has been brought into line with the SendOwl Rebrand from last year. SendOwl has a strong philosophy on design with it aiming to be stylish but minimal, clean, and easy to use (funny how many sites forget this last rather critical part eh?!?) After a lot of analysis and last minute tweaks we think this new design really does hit the spot. Here's what the dashboard looks like:

The chart at the top of the page has been reworked to show payments, profit and conversion rate from the last 30 days. Hover over the graph to see the figures for that day or click the large numbers above to change what you're viewing. To the left of this, and running the whole way down the page, is the new navigation which has been reorganized into new sections. The Account tab was becoming a dumping ground for anything new we added so we rethought where everything should go and came up with a new structure that makes a lot more sense.

Along the top of the page there's a sub-nav which has the section header, a new global search and an notification icon. Notifications are draw from the news feed items which are shown below the chart. The News Feed is completely new for SendOwl and alerts you to events happening in your account that may be of interest - for example new orders coming in, chargebacks, license running low warnings, account payments and so on. The idea behind this is you can see notable things happening without having to go digging into the other sections and saving a few page loads. The most important news feed items are marked with a yellow circle in the news feed and end up in the notification icon which is available on every page.

Moving on to the products page you'll notice that all items types (products, packages and subscriptions) are now in one place. There seemed no point distinguishing between them as fundamentally they're an item that you sell and we think that's all that matters. We've also renamed a package to a bundle as we think it a more descriptive word although in reality everything is just a "product" now as the terminology isn't used again after creating the item.

Above the product list is a button to create a new product which is now done via a modal:

The first modal shows options that asks for the type of product you would like to create and the second asks for the minimum details required to create that item. This keeps the flow as efficient as possible:

Next up is the orders section. Previously orders were combined with reporting which, after much thought, has now been split out into its own section. The orders list, like all lists in the new design, only shows the minimum details for each row with column width changing dynamically as the browser resizes. Loading more items is also more efficient and now just a case of scrolling down the page. We'll detect this and load the next rows automatically rather than having to page through results like in the old interface. The sorting and searching options should make finding orders a lot quicker if you know the details of the item you're looking for.

Clicking an order takes you to the order details page. This page now has information on downloads of the items which has always been available internally but never exposed in the interface. We know this is useful for analysis of most popular files and also PayPal disputes.

Moving on to the Marketing section this new area has all the tools you need to increase sales. At the moment this is Affiliates, Discount Codes and Mailing List integration but watch this space as we have some things planned here in the not too distant future. As you can see the Discount Codes follow the same pattern as the other lists with only the important details shown and scrolling to load more items.

The reporting section is a complete rethink on what we had before. We started with a blank bit of paper and asked what were the questions merchant most frequently wanted answers to. What we ended up with is a really powerful page that lets you slice and dice data by date, order state and metric (with new options for the number of orders and conversion rate available). The graph shows data over the timeline and the table below shows a summary of the data broken down by either Product, Discount Code or Affiliate. This lets you easily see your best performing products/discount codes/affiliates over a given date range which has been a much requested feature.

Finally there's the settings section where you can alter the setup of your account. This includes everything from your personal details through to gateways and taxes. Many of the pages from the old Account section have made it here and have been restyled for the new interface. We even split some of the larger pages out into more logical units.

It's not just the merchant side that's been revamped - the affiliates side of things has also been redone too. They now have the same interface albeit with just a subset of options available. We've improved their signup flow and refined the details they can see on your orders (buyer email, for example, is no longer available to them).

With the state of devices in 2014 there's a lot of different screen sizes ranging from small phones to mega screens several thousand pixels wide. As such we wanted to give merchants as much flexibility as possible in how they used the interface. The button at the bottom of the sidebar can be pressed to collapse the menu at any time like this screenshot shows:

This gives a much larger work area so is ideal for those on smaller screens but our Beta testing has shown some merchants with larger screens also prefer this. If your iPad size or below we'll force the menu to collapse so you'll have a usable amount of screen real estate. On the topic of which the whole interface is now responsive and adapts to the size of your browser. The screenshot below shows how it looks on an iPad for example:

We'll be deploying some further phone optimizations in the coming weeks so keep your eyes peeled for those if you like to manage your account on the move.

And that just about wraps up all the major changes. Reflecting back it has been a great 4 months re-evaluating and reworking the interface. Having several years of data on how the service has been used has proved invaluable in making difficult decisions easy - we've just let the data decide for us. With the stylish new design, the latest tech driving the interface to super fast speeds and optimized flows for common tasks we're hoping you find SendOwl more pleasurable, easier and faster than ever. Please let us know how you find it.

Merry Christmas

2013-12-23T00:00:00Z

From the whole team at SendOwl may we wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy holiday period! SendOwl is global and we have customers in nearly every country in the world so we know not everybody will be on holiday over the next week, but if you are we hope you have a great time and get a chance to switch off from the wired world. We'll still be here for you and processing your orders as normal.

Looking back 2013 has been the year of a change and refinement for SendOwl - a new brand, big investments in hardware and software upgrades, and refinements to existing features. This puts us in an excellent position for 2014 and we've some really big things coming up which we can't wait to share with you. This all starts in January with the much anticipated re-design on the merchant management section. The whole processes around managing your products and orders has been rethought to make it more efficient and leaner. We'll be sharing some teasers in the next few weeks before release so keep your eyes on the blog for more.

Until then all that remains is for me to wish you a happy break once again and we'll see you in 2014!

EU VAT Reverse Charging, PayPal Refunds & Micropayments, EULA's and more

2013-11-21T00:00:00Z

For information on the 2015 EU VAT rule changes please see our dedicated blog post on the 2015 rules and how to set them up with SendOwl

Probably the longest title of blog post that we've ever published. The team at SendOwl have been busy lately and in this blog post I'm going to outline some of the recent changes we've been making. Most are small and they've been deployed progressively over the last few weeks so a few people have noticed them when in their account already. Here's a round up for those that haven't or don't login so often.

EU VAT reverse charging

A real pain for merchants who have to deal with this, reverse VAT charging is a process where the VAT normally due on an order is not charged to VAT registered businesses that are within the EU but outside the merchants own country. The difficulties are numerous but primarily lie in tracking which customers are businesses entities, which of those are VAT registered and of those that are, recording and verifying their VAT details. Hopefully we've substantially reduced this burden with a new feature we pushed out this week. If you're a VAT registered EU merchant simply turn on the EU reverse charging checkbox in your tax section, and we'll then ask your buyers for VAT detalis when checking out:

This feature is only supported on cart transactions at this time. If the buyer enters a valid VAT number, and that number is verified with the EU's VAT number checking service, then the vat is not applied to the order.

Further changes are coming in 2015 when consumers purchasing telecommunications, broadcasting or electronic services will be taxed in the country they are from. We'll be making changes to support this as the time arrives. Until then full details of the feature can be found in the tax knowledge base article

PayPal refunds

Up until now refunding PayPal transactions was a pain. First you have to find the transaction in SendOwl and copy the transaction ID. Then paste this into PayPal to find the transaction (which is rather torturous due to the speed of their website). Then enter a refund amount and click ok, then confirm and finally the refund is issued. There's now a much easier way. When viewing a PayPal order in SendOwl there's a refund link in the sidebar as you get with orders on the other payment gateways. When you visit this link you can issue a refund which we do behind the scenes on your behalf.

To make this work there are a few restrictions: refunds are only possible for 60 days after a sale completes and on the first refund you make you'll need to provide is with some API keys so we can make these requests on your behalf. Full details are available in the PayPal knowledge base article for those who want to know more, or you can just try it on your next refund and we'll guide you through the process.

PayPal micropayments

PayPal micropayments is an alternative pricing mechanism by PayPal that means they charge less of a fee for products priced under $12. The problem with such a scheme is it means they charge more of a fee for prices over $12. Well now SendOwl has the perfect solution: enter your micropayments account email and we'll intelligently route your sales between the two accounts so you always pay the lowest possible fee. A few merchants were using this within hours of release and are already saving money so we think it's going to be a popular addition. Full details can again be found in the PayPal knowledge base article but sellers using currencies other than US dollars should contact support first as the crossover price varies slightly.

Cart terms and conditions (or EULA's)

Some countries have legal requirements that buyers accept Terms and Conditions prior to checkout. Other merchants want to get buyers to agree to their own Terms and Conditions or an EULA (End User License Agreement) before making a payment. Both these cases are now supported with the ability to add a new page on the cart checkout the buyer must go through before making payment.

If the buyer clicks the Agree button they are taken to payment. If they click the Disagree button they are taken back to their cart. Full details can be found in the Shopping Cart knowledge base article

Support for Google's new universal analytics

Google has recently released universal analytics and announced that all existing analytics users will ultimately have to migrate. Google has promised support for the old tracking code for 2 more years but it's still one to be wary of and we'd recommend upgrading when you next get the chance. Full details along with our support and how to identify universal analytics from the other two forms of analytics tracking code(!) can be found in our Google Analytics knowledge base article

Removal of three lesser used features

In addition to all the changes the last three weeks we've also decided to remove some lesser used features. First Google Checkout had it's last official day of support from Google yesterday so support for that has now been removed. Second, test mode which has long been hidden in the user interface and was only available to early customers from a few years back has been removed. And finally support for Clickbank will be ended on the 30th November. The total amount of effected merchants by all three changes is less than 0.5% so none of these are wide reaching moves. Any merchant effected by any of the changes will have been notified via email at the start of this month.

Wrap up

That's all for now. Hope you enjoy the updates as usual. Our next post late this year, or very early next year, will be a big one! Keep your eyes peeled...