So, we just relaunched our partner program and now offer fixed $10 for every seller you invite to Sellfy. Once your invited user reaches at least $50 in transaction volume we will send you ten bucks (together with huge thank you) to your provided PayPal account.

If you are Sellfy user then you already have your referral link, just head over to invite page and share the link on Twitter, Facebook or via email.

Everything is super-simple now, once customer clicks on “buy now” button on your website, we display available payment options without redirecting him anywhere. If you use Stripe or Paymill payment gateways, customer can even fill out the credit card payment form, purchase product and download product right from there. Only in case of PayPal customer will be redirected to PayPal website to finalize the purchase.

Now this is the default action for all buttons but you can also choose the old redirect option to Sellfy checkout page once you create your product (for existing products just go to My products > embed/share page).

As always we welcome for your feedback to continue to improve our service! Good luck with sales!

We are happy to announce that we have finished Stripe & Paymill payment gateway integration and now you can start to accept secure credit card payments via your product pages on Sellfy.

Stripe is the most simplest way to accept payments online and allows users to accept online credit card payments without the need for a merchant account or gateway. Stripe currently works with US/Canada merchants and to start accept payments you only need a valid bank account.

Paymill is the way to go for European merchants. They are active in 32 countries and offer the same simplicity as Stripe and the account activation process it the easiest among other alternatives in Europe.

You can enable one of these payment gateways by going to payment options menu in Sellfy settings page. Just like in case of PayPal, after each purchase you will receive money instantly into your Stripe/Paymill account – it’s fast, reliable and secure!

An active social media presence will engage customers and boost your sales. This idea is so well worn, that it’s quickly become the most boring marketing advice you can give. But as important as it is to build out your social side, the training grounds just aren’t there yet. Every business needs it, but hardly any business schools teach it. This leads to a lot of employees doing conferences or on the job training, but a lot more rogue guns making it up as they go along. While many sites are starting to groom social campaigns – they may be really bad at it. Many even know their bad at it, but social is the last on a long list of very important business initiatives to start. This may leave your new social captain feeling like the last kid picked in gym class.

So everyone is doing it, how do you stand out from all the noise?

The two fighting words for any new social campaign looking to stick out are “Personality and Consistency.” They balance each other out, need each other, push and pull, yen and yang – you get the idea. Forget whatever you named your biceps/fists during your amateur body building days; they are now “Personality” and “Consistency.”

When working on social you time seems to be divided between writing, community managing and getting your design elements screwed on straight. So I’ll break down these, we’ll call them “Boss Levels,” with how you can successfully punch your way to success.

Writing, why is it important?

Hundreds of years ago, when the first Internets were being born, writers saw how much written word would be required and rejoiced! Everyone cheered; old people cried tears of joy. Then all of the writers were given horribly boring copy editing jobs and no one dreamed for a very long time. Social media has turned that on it’s head.

Businesses have blogs now and people come to them when they feel like reading – not just when they need to put their shelves together.

1. Writing & Personality

Take the amazing opportunity of readership to write with personality. Many, many businesses have yet to wake-up to how powerful a well-composed blog can be. A blog instantly makes YOU seem like an authority on the subject AND, here’s the magic, if done with a little flair can make you sound like a friendly, reliable, dare I say– fun business. People. love. funny. Break your blog out of its mundane chains and you’ll be standing out as one of those “cool businesses” in no time.

Oh! And for the less word-savvy of us, I always start my clients out with a (forbidden) word bank. Think of all the zippy, sales-y or just plain common terms that your competitors are using, and stop using them. If everyone in the area says their massage parlor is “soothing” or “an escape”, go a step further and tell your customers “You’ll be on vacation!” “We’ll pound you into jelly.” Irreverence is so in.

2. Writing & Consistency

Smaller outfits usually pass social media responsibility around like a hot potato, or have a committee of people each put in time. You shouldn’t give away the keys to your accounts so freely; but if there’s no other choice, make sure the voice stays consistent no matter who is behind it.

I use another word bank example here, to start generating a style guide. A good method is physically writing down the story of your product again and again; use as many different word combinations as you can. Common threads will arise and these can be knitted into your style guide. The guide will make it possible for 10 different people to tweet for you company and still sound like the same brand. It would also be valuable to standardize a pitch for products or services. Some employees are just better at explaining things than others; don’t let a carelessly written update get in the way of your brand moving into the spotlight.

Visual, Why is it important?

Social media accounts are highly visual, especially Pinterest and tumblr. Here, beautiful images reign supreme. Follow along to find extra ways to depict your brand that won’t leave you out of focus.

3. Visuals & Personality

Images that are beautiful, simple and show action will catch the eye first; see every stock photo, ever. But extra shots of humor or the unexpected will give you the edge. This site has some beautiful examples of creative tactics with facebook cover photos, as well as a free template to create your own. This site will help you with custom Twitter backgrounds. Banner and cover photos across platforms are a great opportunity to grab customers’ attention. They should be changed often, to mimic seasons, campaigns and the inevitably thrilling life that is your company everyday.

4 .Visuals & Consistency

Backgrounds and banner are safe neighborhoods to raise personality, but profile pictures remain steadfast. In visual terms, consistency keeps people aware of who you are. We’ve all had the Facebook friend with the profile picture of a group or peopls, their newly acquired child or a cat doing something legendary – at a glance, we have no idea who this person is. Every time a business changes its avatar, it creates that awkward period of reacquaintance. It makes sense to change up your traditional logo for a big event or campaign, but those are the only unless you are rebranding everything. If you do, get several sizes of your new logo, because every platform uses different dimensions. This website has a downloadable template to sample image sizes across all platforms and this one has some great quick-fact sizing info.

Community, Why is it important?

Ok, biggest for last – this is the dude. Community is something only seen in slivers before social media bounced into the world, so it’s the newest idea for all of us. Here’s the idea: Hopefully, we all have at least one business we feel home at. Someone there knows your name, or at least your face and what you come in for. We have rapport there. A number one reason people dislike Internet or large corporate businesses is they seem cold to the touch, distant – nothing like Ole Uncle Jafar’s Lamb Shack, back home, ya know? But a conversational social media presence can chat those skeptics into friends. You can respond to customers with “Hey, Janet!” instead of “To Whom It May Concern.”

5. Community & Personality

Showing a clear, bold personality makes customers feel they get to peek behind the counter. Respond to them with “hey man” or “Our mistake!” Instagram pictures of your kids or the working process. Whatever you can do to make things transparent, personable and uniquely you! Taking risks here will set you far apart for the other artists who only talk about art, or consultants who only give tips. That’s nice, but what makes people love you is showing them how mischievous your dog is; honestly, that’s just much more important.

6. Community & Consistency

To help foster community in your accounts, think of the whole outfit like a newspaper; a “you” digest. People will read the Sunday headlines just because they are the Sunday headlines. Your blog, your discussions, your “App of the week” – whatever, do it at the same time, every time. Users will fall into a rhythm with you. If you start running out of ideas — look back at the newspaper example. The top stories are different topics each week, but things like crosswords or horoscopes are sustainable, easy content for papers. Generating inspirational quotes, pictures of the day, employee backgrounds and so on is like shooting content in a barrel. These items are easy to keep consistent and help put a lot of meat on the bones of a newly blooming site.

Personality and consistency are the perfect guidelines to direct your social ventures. Whether you are you are simply trying to get some conversation going around a new e-book or you need to strategize the year-long strategy for a major brand – this one/two punch will keep you going for many rounds to come!

Flawless Formatting

Many e-book publishing platforms reformat your book to their own file standards. Sellfy will not alter your text and leaves it to the reader to buy what format they need. Only thing to remember is to offer your e-book in different formats suited for all types of readers and devices. But simplicity is the name of the game for e-books, no matter what file type you or your (e-)readers prefers.

Keep in mind, e-readers often allow users to reformat the content themselves. This is well after it’s left your hands. So not only should your work be clear and readable on your screen; it needs to translate to smaller screens, bigger screens and screens with a purple filter zoomed in x400.

This is why e-books generally go without special fonts, colors – even completely ignoring photo content. Pt. 12 Times New Roman may not be your favorite font, but it translates beautifully everywhere. Large chapter headings and indentations should also be kept to a minimum. It’s best to not go above pt. 14 or put more than four blank lines in a row. The end result may seem initially stark, but having a readable, high quality end result is well worth it. Set your margins to 1 inch and write away!

Deciding on Content

What will your book be about? Maybe this is the million-dollar question, but you’ll have to answer it a thousand times: to your audience and yourself. Naturally, the options for what to write about are endless. But if your subject isn’t focused then your writing process will be endless too.

Keep an elevator pitch in mind. Your work may be brilliantly complex, but it’s crucial to be able to condense the idea enough that you could pitch it to a strange on a short elevator ride (or in a small field of text on the Sellfy site). If this seems impossible, your topic may be too wide.

“Write what you know” is said again and again in writing circles. But that’s because it’s an effective strategy. Take a topic you are more learned on than most, and focus on exactly what makes your unique stance so valuable, then maybe tell a few jokes and voila! –you’ve just written an e-book! Ok, it will take a few more drafts than that. But you get the idea; focus first.

Finding an Audience

Who is going to buy this thing? I’m sure you’re mother will pick-up a copy. But if you want to sell more than one e-book it’s important to have an audience in mind. Narrow subjects like “Eastern European Art History from 1800-1950” will immediately have a small and specific fan base. But something like “How to Change Your Life Through Blogging” could go in any direction. Think about the people your work will be the most valuable to and write for them.

Pricing Your Product

Pricing creative work is difficult. As the creator you’ll want to go high because of the personal value the work holds for you. Then you’ll want to go low, because you want your message to spread and be accessible. Where’s the happy medium?

Start by looking at the price of similar e-books. Take into account page length and how saturated the market is, also the intentions of your buyer. A book about investment banking can sell for more than “Hitchhiking 101” simply because the audience is more probably willing and able to pay for it.

Finally, think about your personal pull. If you are a well-known authority on the topic then it will be easier for you to sell. If this is your first e-book a lower price is more reasonable. Scarcity matters too. Although your tactics on interior decorating or leveraging Google Analytics may be brilliant; there are a lot of voices on the topic. Pen the definitive guide on “How To Beat Cancer”, however, and see how such rare information sells at a high price.

Create a Cover that Sells

Walk down a book aisle or past a magazine rack and chances are your eye goes directly to a particular product. Attention grabbing covers are just as powerful on the digital space as in person. While your e-book may be devoid of pictures, this is a chance to tell your story visually.

In a pinch, you can make a simple cover on a word processor and save it as a .pdf file. But if you have any photo editing software, this would be a great time to dust it off. Consider obtaining some professional stock photos or bringing in a designer friend.

Keep in mind the final image will be presented as a thumbnail, so something extremely intricate won’t translate. But buyers do read e-books by their covers and the quality of your preview image denotes the quality of what’s inside– it’s not a time to be skipping steps.

The functionality is very simple and will allow you to communicate directly with your clients and send product updates, bug fixes, newsletters and more. Just head over the “E-mail updates” from your Sellfy dashboard, select the list of recipients (list of people who bought one of your products), enter the e-mail content and click send.

In case you are sending product updates, you have ability to include download link into the email content as well. It will send the client exactly the same download link he received after the purchase and we will reset the download counter to 5 times. Just remember to update the product file before you send out the update so that clients can download the updated content.

As always we will be very happy to receive your feedback, just head over the comments section and let me know what you think!

When we build products, whether those products are musical compilations, software plugins, workbooks or other things entirely, we do so in order to get paid. It’s incredibly rare that anyone builds a product with the sole plan of giving it away for free — even non-profits tend to think in terms of the purchases or donations they can get by offering a certain product.

But there are certain situations in which giving away a product for free makes sense. Sometimes it’s only on a one-time basis. Sometimes it’s giving away that product to everyone who wants one. When it makes sense to offer your product for free:

1. Review copies

 If you want people to write reviews of your product, you can’t count on them purchasing a copy of their own. If you haven’t built enough awareness of your product yet, offering a review copy for free to someone may be the only way to get that person to even look at what you’re offering. You can afford to be selective with who you offer review copies to, though, so don’t feel like you need to give a copy away to anyone who asks.

2. Building an audience

 Giving something away for free can be a major attention-getter. If you’re working to build an audience and demonstrate your expertise in a given topic, giving away a free report or tool can be a fast way to do it. You do have to promote a giveaway almost as hard as a sale, but giving away files (essentially free to copy) can be inexpensive next to many other kinds of marketing. If you can get an email address for each person who downloads a copy of your product, you haven’t really given it away — you’ve sold it for the permission to contact those people in the future.

3. Donations to groups that really need your product:

Sometimes we do something that isn’t about the money, like donating enough of your product to a group that needs it to truly make an impact. Giving copies of an ebook about building a better career, for instance, to a non-profit that specializes in working with the unemployed can be a situation where there isn’t a financial upside but that makes you feel personally rewarded.

4. Promoting a bigger product

 There can be direct financial rewards for giving a product away for free, if you do it right. Giving away a copy of a great ebook to every person who buys a high-priced product through your affiliate link can make that gift a direct income source for you. Bundles and other sales can have a similar impact on your bottom line, including when all of the products in question are your own. It can seem like you’re not making as much money overall (the total if you added up the value of everything you sell), but if you make a sale that you wouldn’t have gotten any other way, it’s more than worth it.

There are plenty of other ways to give away your product for free and come out ahead. Of course, you do need to eventually make some sales, but these situations can help you create opportunities to sell your products.

When I launched my first ebook, I wrote thirty-one posts promoting it on my blog before I even started to create the product. I did most of the marketing before I had the product ready (although I did know exactly what the product was going to look like and what was going in it). When I launched my second ebook, I wrote the ebook first and then took my sweet time getting around to marketing it. I’ve tried both options — creating my product first and marketing the product long before there’s anything to sell. With that experience behind me, it seems obvious which step to take first.

The Argument for Marketing First

There are quite a few people who feel strongly that you should start marketing your idea before you even figure out exactly what form it will take as a product. Clay Collins, the founder of a well-known online marketing program, has actually told his audience that he doesn’t create any of his products until after he sells them, which in turn lead to a product teaching his audience how to presell products (which has since been added into the Marketing Program).

The arguments for this approach are logical: First, you should find out exactly what your audience wants and sell them that, rather than building something and waiting to see what happens. Second, if you can sell a product before you actually create it, you’ll have more resources to build it right. In a roundabout way, this is the same logic that powers Kickstarter.

The Argument for Creating Your Product First

On the other hand, not having a clear idea of what you want to sell makes it a lot harder to market. You might start out with one concept but as you build it, you will tweak that idea, if not entirely change it to go with something else. That makes marketing a lot harder.

There’s also almost always slippage in the timeline when you’re building a product, particularly if you don’t have a lot of experience to draw on when estimating how soon you can be ready to launch. Even after building multiple products, I’m still a little off on estimating how long something can take. Chris Guillebeau, a blogger who has used his information products to launch a book-writing career, actually discusses his first product in his new book, $100 Startup: he had surveyed his audience about creating a product that showed how to travel the world on a budget and gotten a great response. But the product failed to sell — despite the fact Guillebeau had essentially marketed it ahead of time. But he was able to collect data from the first launch and create a whole new product that sold 500 copies on the day he launched. Without the real information from that failed product, Guillebeau couldn’t have built his more successful follow up.

The Chicken or the Egg?

It’s hard to argue against knowing your audience inside out before building your product — especially when you’re creating something like an ebook or app for the very first time. But it takes only one little slip up on delivery to ruin all the hard work on your marketing.

It’s anecdotal evidence, but in my experience, the best option is to have your product to a point where you’d feel comfortable selling it before you start marketing hard. You can and should do everything you can to prove that your audience wants what you are going to sell beforehand, but you can do that by blogging, surveying and otherwise establishing a product — not marketing something that doesn’t exist yet. Build your product first and you’ll be in better shape to market it.

When you’re building and marketing your first product, you have to juggle a lot of moving parts. Even setting aside getting the product ready to sell, you’ve got to think about the emails you’ve got to send out to your mailing list, guest posts you’re going to submit to other blogs and even what you’re going to send out on social media networks.

The only way to really keep each of these pieces straight is to build an editorial calendar — a management document that lets you see at a glance where each piece is going, how close to ready for publication it is and when it goes up. If you were to look behind the scenes at a magazine, a big blog or a PR firm, there’s always an editorial calendar in play.

Plan Your Content Backwards From Your Launch Date

It may go without saying, but the dates are particularly important, since we’re talking about a calendar. You need to schedule each piece of content you plan to release in order to build interest in your product. You’ll need to set a date for when the piece of content should go live for people to read or listen to. You’ll also need to set due dates for preparing that content.

You almost certainly have a specific launch date in mind for your product. You’ve got to build up interest around your product from the moment that it’s available for purchase (and perhaps a little earlier). Start from your launch date and plan out each element of what you want to do to promote your product.

Put every item on your calendar:

1. Posts to your own blog or website
2. Emails to your list
3. Guest posts
4. White papers, reports or other longer documents that you’re releasing for free
5. Social media updates
6. Videos and audio files
7. Materials to help your affiliates make sales

If you’re using a spreadsheet, make a row for each piece of content you plan to publish.

Pull Together the Information You Need to Build Your Editorial Calendar

Depending on what project management tools you’re using in your business, an editorial calendar may be very familiar or an entirely foreign way of doing things. At its most basic, an editorial calendar can be a spreadsheet that you use in conjunction with your task management software — it just needs to lay out the information on each element in your marketing campaign.

These are the elements that are absolutely necessary to create an effective planning document:

• Where a piece of content if going to be published — a video might be going up on YouTube, a guest post may need to be submitted to a specific site and so on
• When you’re hoping each piece of content will be published (as well as other important dates, like when you need have it in to the editor)
• Any media elements that you need to line up, like photographs
• Requirements and notes for preparing the content, such as the ideal word count
• Any additional promotion you need to do for a specific piece of content, like tweeting about it or asking friends to vote for it

In that same spreadsheet where your content is laid out in rows, put each of these elements in their own column. Then it’s just a matter of filling out the cells between and actually producing your content.
That’s easier said than done, of course. Without an editorial calendar, it’s possible that you can get every piece of content out that you need to market your first product — but it’s going to be a lot harder. If you just work down your editorial calendar based on how soon you need a piece ready, though, the process will be a lot more manageable even if you do have a lot of content to write.

Image by Flickr user Joe Lanman

Affiliates have been notable driving force for e-commerce sales and they play a huge role in increasing visibility and earnings for your products. The idea was to give you a very easy to use tool for attracting these influencers and turning your customers into product ambassadors.

How does it work?

First of all you will need your product on Sellfy, assuming you already have one you can setup an affiliate offer by going to “My products” > “Affiliate offers”. To setup an affiliate offer you will need to specify affiliate share and provide some additional details for your affiliates.

You can also specify where to redirect all traffic coming from affiliate links. Enter the URL of your product website and all traffic trough affiliate links will flow directly there. If you don’t have your own site yet, you can use Sellfy checkout page as well.

Turn customers into affiliates!

We have also integrated affiliate programs directly into the Sellfy checkout pages so that you can turn your customers into affiliates right from there. Previously you had an option to provide discount for promoting your products trough Facebook and Twitter. From now on you can give a commission from every deal your customers helped to make. Using performance based rewards you will be able to attract more powerful influencers and turn one-time campaigns into longterm relationships!

Sigh up for Sellfy here and start selling!