Selling Tips

Online businesses have so many more opportunities to market than pre-internet brick and mortar stores. But with those opportunities come some challenges. You’re expected to show up in so many different places and have a presence in so many channels. Email marketing, new social media platforms all the time, mobile marketing, etc.  How do you keep it all going at once without dropping the ball? Where do you find the time? According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound report for 2019, The top marketing challenge for companies was generating leads and traffic, followed by proving the ROI of their marketing methods and obtaining the budget to pull it all off. Marketing automation tools can help you with all three.  Automating your online marketing can help you generate more leads and grow your traffic, analyze exactly the ROI you’re getting on your marketing, and reduce your costs making it easier to hit...

Whether you want to create a freedom lifestyle or just build a business that can scale, selling a digital product is one of the best options out there. Unlike a direct service, you’re not limited by the amount of time you have to provide it. And unlike a physical product, there’s no inventory, no shipping, and no worries about where your customers are located. Once a digital product has been created, it can be bought and downloaded by as many customers as you can find. This means you can scale the business to any size while working from anywhere.  So, what does it take to start a digital product store in 2019? The tools are definitely available. Here’s what you need to get started:  A Great Product Of course, you need something to sell. If you’re considering starting a digital product store, you may already have a product in mind...

Social proof has been a “thing” for years, but it’s still one of the hottest trends in marketing today. Why? Because it works, and it’s just what you need to send your digital product sales into the stratosphere. Simply put, people like what other people like and they buy what other people are buying. It’s the same dynamic that is making influencer marketing is so hot right now.  But how can you leverage social proof to make a difference in your bottom line and your digital product sales? With the growth of social media and the corresponding growth of technology, social proof is relevant to marketing on a scale that Robert Cialdini likely never imagined when he first coined the term in his 1984 book, Influence.And while influencer marketing is important, social proof goes far beyond influencers, with testimonials, good reviews, expert opinions and blurbs, personal recommendations, and more, playing a...

In 2019, everyone is talking about why we need multiple income streams to ensure that our finances are secure. After all, if one is suddenly disrupted or dries up, having other options will ensure that our bills still get paid. There are lots of options out there, but there are many unique benefits to selling digital downloads that makes it the perfect side business and a powerful income stream. When you consider the wide variety of options that the world of digital downloads opens up for you, it’s easy to see why selling digital downloads is so lucrative.  So whether ebooks, printables, graphics, audio, courses, graphics, or some other type of download fits best in your niche, there’s definitely an option for you. And this is a case of the sky truly being the limit, especially with platforms like DPD offering a one-stop shop for anyone wanting to make money selling digital...

One of the biggest things you can do to improve sales and give a professional appearance to your information products is have a great cover / product photo for your downloadable product. In the case of ebooks or PDFs, this means you need a cover you can use on your website, on your product in DPD to be shown in the cart and customer portal, and when marketing your product. In this post we'll go over some options for creating covers and show you a simple workflow to create your own. You have several options for creating ebook covers: 1. Pay a design professional to create one for you. If you're not a professional graphic designer then this will by far generate the best result. However, many ebook authors are bootstrapping with little to no budget, and designers can cost anywhere from $50-500 for professional cover design, putting it outside...

We came across an interesting article today titled The Coupon Code is a Slap In the Face that was decidedly anti-coupon code. From the article: You want to pay for this product or service. You were prepared to pay the advertised price; now you know there is (or has been) a magical passcode that could get you a lower price. You fire up Google, and search: “product name, coupon code.” You get pages of results: mostly garbage, some scams, and a few legitimate coupon sites. Unfortunately, the codes listed on those sites are a year old: you missed your chance.Why do web apps and retailers do this to their paying customers? At the moment you’re actually ready to buy something you get a slap in the face: ”You’re paying full price, but if you had our magic code you wouldn’t have to.” We're Not Anti-Coupon if Thats What You're In...

Every author, writer or content creator has the opportunity to directly interact with the target audience today. In the past, it’s been necessary to write something and submit it to publishing companies and hopefully catch a break at some point on the way to becoming a famous or at least a somewhat successful writer. Doing the actual writing is a process in itself, but the end of the writing and editing process is only the middle of the journey. Today, the writer has a few more duties to take on in order to become successful. Here are three things writers need to successfully launch an e-book. 1. An Interested Audience You might think this is a bit backward in concept. After all, aren’t you supposed to do the writing and then the audience will form around the book? That’s true, but only to a point. In the past, the publisher...

Here at DPD we often get asked what is the best format to deliver a file to Mobile Devices. These include Android, Blackberry, and iOS devices like the iPad, iPhone, and iPod. Delivering Files to Apple Devices The bottom line: You can't without special apps. iOS devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod do not have a user accessible file system. It's not like a PC or Mac where you just download the file with the browser to your desktop. There is no way for a user of an Apple mobile device to "download" or "save" a file to their device from the internet without a specific app that is associated with that file type and includes the ability to save it.   For example, if buyers have iBooks and you're selling a compatible PDF, they'll probably be able to save it (if they know how).   If you're delivering a...

This week we added a new feature to our website- live chat through Olark. The verdict so far? We love it. We don't often write about other services here, but we're really pleased and think that live chat could be a powerful tool to help our vendors with their sales and conversions so we're going to tell you our experience thus far- Olark has a different approach to live chat than many other services- they use the common XMPP protocol for their chat servers instead of proprietary software. For those not up to date on chat protocols, the XMPP protocol is the same thing that Jabber, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, and a host of other chat services use. XMPP support is built in to every multi-protocol chat client and is a snap to set up. Here at DPD that's pretty important- I'm on Windows 7, Jacob is on a Mac,...

Seamus Anthony, a Melbourne, Australia-based musician and DPD user has written a great article on taking advantage of internet marketing techniques to promote music as an independent artist. He talks about not only getting more exposure for your music, but also making sales: Classic Internet marketing is not usually the kind of thing that musicians tend to consider appropriate for promoting their art. Yet to me, giving it a go makes perfect sense because getting more Facebook “likes” or YouTube views is one thing, and an important thing, but it’s not a sale. He also mentions DPD as a platform for not only selling your music, but also as a content delivery network for distributing your free track downloads. Give it a look: Do Internet Marketing Techniques Work for Selling Music?