Selling Downloads

This is a great question and is usually the start of the journey. Luckily, your skills and interests should be pretty good guides for you. For example, if you are a songwriter and in a band, I would imagine that the download you want to sell is a collection of mp3s of your music! On the other hand, maybe you are a passionate blogger with a really solid understanding of a subject are that people are interested in. I would guess you might want to sell an ebook as a PDF. The sky's the limit!

Well, for one thing, you'll need access to people. This could be your blog or website, but your MySpace page or Facebook fan page could also work as well. The key here is to be seen by lots of people who are interested in what you have to offer. If you can't show your product to someone, how in the world are you going to sell it to them? So, step #1: get an audience!

If you already have an audience, great! Now you need the file itself! If this is a collection of mp3s for an album, make sure its 100% finished and zip it together. Remember, put it in a format that most people will use or recognize, like mp3. If you want to combine all files together into one, I would suggest a zip file. Most operating systems (like Windows or Mac OS X) have zip support built-in. If you have an ebook, make sure its written and editing to completion and put it in a popular format like PDF (or even zip together several popular formats!).

Now that you have a product and it is a nice fit to your audience, its time to move on to the next step. Finding a way to get the file into the hands of the customer after they pay for it! If you are a musician, you can use resources like CDBaby or even iTunes. Others can search for more specific marketplaces that fit their niche and sell downloads. However, if you just want to offer your file on your website or MySpace without going through any fancy services, you could try a combination of a payment service like PayPal and an automated file delivery service like BitBuffet.

A service like CDBaby or iTunes or ThemeForest or Amazon Book Store may be an effective way to reach a mass market, but what about your audience? You don't want to leave them out! While you could always paste a link to the specialized service's page about your product, you might get stuck in red tape and be upset with the small cut you get from these services.

An alternative is to use a service like PayPal to collect the payments. PayPal usually only takes about 30 cents and 2.9% of a transaction. From the sale of a $10 product, you get $9.41 after PayPal fees. Using a service like BitBuffet or E-Junkie costs about $6 a month no matter how many sales you make while a service like PayLoadz will increase the monthly cost based on sales numbers.

These types of delivery services offer several advantages, the main one being automation. The delivery emails are sent out automatically on purchase and the downloads are available instantly. Another nice thing is that the downloads themselves are securely hosted (meaning customers can't share their download links with the world).