Others prefer to use websites that allow you to sell downloads but you have to send them to their site, or possible add a widget to your site. They usually take a cut of each transaction. This is also an option but keep it mind many of these sites go out of business and you end up losing all your transactions (and often email addresses of those who bought). Some sites are even file specific – like music sites allowing you to sell mp3s (but not zip files, videos, PDFs, etc).

One of the concerns with digital downloads is that somebody can pass the URL around to others. So many people try to provide a unique and temporary URL to the buyer to avoid this problem. While this is a good idea, there’s nothing stopping from people from sharing the actual digital file!

Over time and with the continuing advancements in open source software, I’ve opted to set up my own shopping cart. You can also avoid many ongoing monthly fees this way. This is pretty easy thanks to Wordpress and the e-shop plugin for wordpress. Free plugins are now installable right from the Wordpress admin panel so you don’t even have to download anything! If you like the plugin you should consider donating to the creator.

After I set up the shopping cart settings (paypal email address, ‘from’ email, etc) I was looking around to find out where I set up my products. It turns out that is done on a new Wordpress page. So upload your file (that will be purchased) first, so that it is available on your new Wordpress page (there’s a Product Entry section under the blank page area). A dropdown will be available showing all your downloadable files. If you want to give customers a few files at once, I suggest putting them in a zip file.

Here’s a tutorial on setting it up. Note some possible issues with conflicting plugins. I offer consulting services so feel free to contact me if you need help!

I offer consulting services so feel free to contact me if you need help!

We know we should create a specific link for every page, video, social network but we often don’t do it. So we don’t know which links are producing better results so we can do more of that. I recently reached out to some of the affiliate managers and they were quite helpful.

Link Tracking

With the ShareASale affiliate network you can add a special parameter to your link namely afftrack=xxx. So instead of using the same link all over the place you might put afftrack=youtube for a link in your youtube video (or more specifically the exact video if you have more than one). Or for a blog post afftrack=blogTop10TwitterTools.

Deep Linking

Another thing many of us don’t do is link to a specific page on the product website. Many of us send people to the order now page or the home page, making it difficult for people to find the product at times or coming off as too salesy. Why not send them to a content rich page? Many times we don’t have this link or we waste time looking for a specific link that’s been created for us. With the ShareASale affiliate network you can pick any page you want at the vendor site (a blog post for example) then create your own custom link. That way you can send people to those pages from your social networks and not come across as spammy. The way this works is through cookies being stored on the users machine, even though they don’t go right to the order page, the cookie tracks the sites domain so you are credited for the eventual sale.

The amazing thing is that you could even link to a site totally separate from the product website, create your own custom link and as long as the person finds the product page (through that separate website link) you will be credited for the sale! So you could create a custom link to a youtube video if the video description has a link to the product page (so that the user can hopefully click it and buy). Of course this is a more indirect method. You would want to test both sending them direct to buy page (so no distractions) or to less sales-oriented pages.

photo credit: rafeejewell

If you have Wordpress this is pretty easy as there is a Facebook social plugin (and others). Facebook explains the Like button on their website. More and more actions around the web will be tied into social networking, what your friends like, are doing and even has e-commerce implications as 3rd party websites will know what you ‘like’. A very powerful trend that you need to be on top of.

I offer consulting services so feel free to contact me if you need help!

Click bottom right button on player for full screen!

In order to make this work you’ll need to download some php code. You can get it at CashMusic. They also have a blog post about setting up Tweet for Track but it’s mostly about setting up the Twitter access. The php code is a series of files with a .php extension as well as two directories. You’ll need to put this code on your server, I suggest in a folder called something like tft so the URL would be http://mysite.com/tft. I use CoreFTP to move the files there.

In order for your website to send a tweet on behalf of the fan, you need to gain access to the Twitter APIs (application programming interface) which are a series of functions that you will need to invoke. Go to the blog post above to find out more. To get this going go to Twitter apps. You’ll need to be logged in to your Twitter account (get one if you don’t have one). For application name it has to be unique so put some like Tweet for Track Band Name, where Band Name is your band name. If you put the code in a directory called tft (my suggestion), the callback URL would be http://mysite.com/tft/callback.php. For application website put http://mysite.com/tft and website http://mysite.com

Default access type = Read and Write, and Use Twitter for Login is No (Note you don’t have to select Yes for ‘Use Twitter for Login’ as mentioned in the video), application type is Browser. Once you submit this you will get a Twitter secret and key. You put these and a few other things in the config.php file which is part of the download. The config.php file has some helpful documentation (see below). Paste the secret and key into the file, add your twitter username without the @ symbol, add your Twitter ID (go to your twitter page and click on the RSS feed link at bottom right and you’ll see your_id.rss. Copy that id (the number before .RSS) into the file. Edit the OAUTH callback field to be http://mysite.com/tft/callback.php (same as what you put in the Twitter form).

The default tweet and required content are important also. The default tweet is what you want the fan to tweet, so a link to your Tweet for Track page along with the name of the song and your twitter name is a good start. Think about what you want others to see to encourage them to download it too! The required content could be your exact default tweet or a subset of the tweet, such as at least the link to your page. You can leave this blank if you don’t want to force the user to tweet anything specific.

You also need to set the download URL to your file and the track name.

/**
* @file
* A single location to store configuration.
*/

// add a string to randomize the session variable names. or don't. whatever.
define('RANDOMIZE_SESSION', '123456');
?>

This will essentially get you up and running! Of course I ran into a few glitches along with way. One is making sure you are running version PHP5 (not 4). I had to upgrade this on my GoDaddy web host by going into the admin panel. I also had a problem with some of the core PHP libraries which are part of your web host, the php.ini file wasn’t pointing at the right library. My first point of contact when I had issues was CashMusic (info@cashmusic.org). Then I emailed the support desk of my web host.

Another problem I got was something like ‘can’t modify header, already created’. The most common reason for this is a space before or after the opening/closing php tags (

There are some other things you probably want to modify such as the cashmusic logo. The easy way to do this is delete the bg.gif image in the assets folder. If you see anything else you don’t want you just have to edit the php file that contains it, such as the content_download.php that contains the text on the download page.

Good luck!

This video explains how two companies are
adjusting to what their customers want:

http://bit.ly/WLInsider

Is your business doing the same?

Watch the video to find out.

Enjoy!

Will

P.S Don’t disregard this “trend”. As the
video explains, it’s responsible for one
customer spending over $80,000 during the
last 5 years with one of the companies
featured in this video:

http://bit.ly/WLInsider

—–
NOTE: I am a compensated affiliate for
WishList Products.
—–

• Get a domain name (or use an existing one)
• Sign up or a web hosting plan via HostGator or GoDaddy

I just need the login info to either HostGator or GoDaddy. Go to the contact page and send me:
-the transaction id for your purchase of hostgator web hosting plan
-the transaction id for your purchase of Wishlist Member Plugin
-the username and password to login into your hostgator account (to install wordpress and upload plugin)
-the username password to login into your domain account (to point domain at your webhost servers)

Want to use a different web host or domain registrar? Send me a note and we’ll talk!
Already have a web hosting plan and/or domain name? I can install Wordpress, and any theme you choose for $100. After that you’ll just need to add your content via the browser which is easy!

Just go to the contact page and send me the details!

I do the same thing on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Ustream and so on. I love teaching and am trying to get it up to a sustainable level so I can do it full time.

After a couple weeks of stressing out because I didn’t have network access, had insane deadlines and so on, one of the projects I was working on moved out of my scope. So I then only had about 50% workload and upcoming work nowhere in sight at the moment. So I mentioned this to some of the managers. ‘We’ came up with the idea that I work from home part-time and wait out the upcoming work, which they couldn’t say when would happen exactly. The key takeaways are that I mentioned I didn’t have enough work (which many people don’t want to admit at their job) and secondly that you present it in a way where they can come up with the idea themselves.

So on friday I just picked up the key fob (for remote vpn access) and today I just booked a flight to Florida! After I got the key fob it suddenly hit me: Once you are able to work remotely you can basically work anywhere in the world! My family (mom, 2 sisters and brother-in-law) is renting a house in Palm Beach for the month of February.

It’s hard to believe but I’ve actually talked to people who would rather go to an office to work so they don’t have to do work at home. They forget about getting dressed for work, commuting, buying lunch, dealing with annoying co-workers, cubicle hell, meetings, parking and so on!

So plan to start working remotely. Ask the boss to work one day a week from home or find another job that let’s you work from home one or more days a week. I recently applied for a job that is completely virtual. And read the book ‘The Four Hour Work Week’ by Tim Ferris. Time to live the dream baby!

In any case, it’s a great time to start your own online business!

The current recession has wiped out a lot of our savings, reduced property and investment values, removed jobs (that may never return), and reconfirmed our suspicions that the big corporations can’t be trusted and that there is really no job security (if there ever was). With these problems, comes a desire to take back control and make some extra cash to help us get back on track.

As bad as it is today, I prefer to see it as a blessing in disguise. I’ve been ‘out of work’ for over a year for the most part, and this has allowed me to finally focus on my passion, which is helping people by teaching them what I’ve learned whether that be how to play guitar, or how to start a website business online. I’ve made many mistakes and learned a lot over the last year.

To me, it’s never been a better time to start a business. This is because you can start one for almost nothing these days, especially if you do it using online tools. Instead of building the usual ‘brick and mortar’ business, which requires a large capital investment (for office space, equipment, employees, etc) you can start one with low overhead. Work from home, do everything yourself at first, or my preference – build an online business.

This can sound scarier than it is. All you really need is a website and something to sell. It doesn’t even have to be your own products. You don’t even need to incorporate, just start as a sole proprietor. A solo proprietor is basically the same as being an employee but you get to deduct your business expenses. Websites are incredibly easy to set up these days as things have progressed substantially on the Internet with many free software tools.

If you have a job and hate working there and commuting, or aren’t following your true passion, you can start this on the side after work and on weekends. This can bring in some extra cash to build back up your savings, pay off debts or for fun money. I know it’s hard to do this after a long day of work and commuting but it has to be done. But this is not a get rich quick scheme, you will have to put in some work!

If this sounds exciting to you, then stay tuned for future posts. If you have questions and can’t wait feel fee to contact me.