Selling Digital Products Online With Secure Delivery
This review of Secure Delivery includes a live example, so don’t forget to scroll down to check it out!
In May, I wrote a short article detailing my predictions for the Top 5 Forms of Monetization that website and blog owners would use in the year 2008. At number 2 on the list, was the sale of Information Products such as eBooks and PDF’s.
I’ve already started to see the upward trend in the releasing of information materials which attempt to either capture email addresses for the purpose of upselling affiliate products later, or the straight-off selling of the electronically sent items. Google Trends seems to spot the same pattern:
Unfortunately, for big-time publishers and first time sellers who release a book on blogging for example, there are limited choices of platforms available to sell the digital products. If you wanted to sell podcasts for example (a varying form of information product), the easiest but most time consuming method of delivery would be to process all orders manually, using Paypal to collect revenue.
But why be made to suffer the hard work of manual labour in the digital age, where automation is the key to increased productivity and profits?
Secure Delivery
Recently, a long-time subscriber Jason from JcCommerce, contacted me with regards to doing a review on his newly launched business – Secure Delivery. Obviously I jumped at the chance, having myself been a subscriber to his site, and having followed the ideas and launch behind SD. To quote from the website:
Secure Delivery gives you secure, automatic delivery of your products to paying customers while you do other things. Secure Delivery automatically validates purchases, authorizes downloads, and tracks your sales while preventing link sharing and product theft.
Jason and his team recently remodelled the frontpage of the site with new graphics in order to increase the visual appeal, especially for first time visitors. In my opinion, the emphasised colour helps to draw my eye down the page, however, further emphasis should be made on the Free Signup button in the sidebar – this really is the beginning call-to-action, and should appeal to each and every visitor in order to increase signup rates.
The site in general is laid out very well, with an easy-to-use navigation and no hassle links to pricing plans and importantly, a blog. These days, many businesses have started to use blogs as a powerful medium of communication between them and their potential clients and customers.
Advice on the blogging front to Jason, would be firstly to introduce a little graphic integrated into the Secure Delivery logo which says “blog“. Branding is very important, and you want to make sure you appear friendly and professional. At the moment, the blog only has news articles related to the growth and launch of various aspects of the Digital Product Delivery site. Writing more generic articles such as “10 Reason Why Using Secure Delivery Will Help Your Ebook Sales” or “101 Tips For The Internet Marketer” will help to promote search engine spiderability, and may get picked up on Social Networking sites – thus enabling more streams of traffic and conversion potential.
Grab A Free Secure Delivery Account
A very cool promotion which Jason is holding, is the option to get a Free account. The team made it very clear to me that this has absolutely no strings attached, and you don’t even have to signup with Paypal to make use of it. The only restrictions are, is that there is a 50mb limit for uploading products, and you can only use Paypal – I only use Paypal anyway, so no problems there!
The signup process is incredibly simple, and for the Freebie account, requires no credit card information or confidentialities either! Once you’re up online (which can take literally minutes), here is what you’ll see:
Again, another great overview of your account – and the cleanliness and simplicity of the design are other plus points, in comparison to the large backend behind many other tool sites. I’m not a big fan of the small grey font used, so maybe this is a small thing which could be changed. This is only a small critique, because every other factor is so well laid out, including links to Documentation (checkout the PDF on Paypal – the PortalLabs logo needs changing here Jason), and Help and Support Options.
Another smaller critique, would be to either remove or populate the Forums. Whilst its great that you obviously havn’t had any major issues and problems, it seems like dead space, so posting more regularly by yourselves may act as another ice-breaker and could include calls to upgrade accounts.
Selling A Digital Product
Whilst the site is only a small portion of the business, it’s the actual selling tools that count. Mark has already made a great tutorial on selling digital products with Secure Delivery – so be sure to give that a read.
Creating a new SD Product is easy – click the link in the Dashboard, enter the product name > then quantities available and payment processing options (I hear that support for 2CO and Google Checkout are in the works). Then a price can be set. On top of this, there are more detailed options, such as configuring a download limiter, a return URL after purchase and Analytics tracking code for performance purposes.
In order to fully test out the system, here’s one I made earlier. I grabbed a copy of the freely available Adwords Made Easy by Brad Callen and uploaded the eBook to the system. So that you guys can really see how the payment process is smoothly integrated, the price for the eBook is £0.01 or 2 cents. So in order to give your 2 cents (no pun intended), click on the graphic below – which is also freely provided by Secure Delivery:
There are 100 available, so don’t miss out 😉
Adding your own custom button graphic is very easy, as SD provides you with easy to copy code – all you have to do is add links to your own picture – easy HTML stuff.
All in all, Secure Delivery is an awesome product which I’m totally hooked on now. I’ve begun thinking of creating my own Information Product, just so that I can continue using SD. There’s also an affiliate program which offers 30% on all referrals you make, another attractive offer which has got me caught.
For those already selling some sort of e-product, Jason tells me that an affiliate system is soon going to be implemented, so that you can signon affiliates to help sell your products. To conclude, DigitalProductDelivery will be huge, no doubt about it. I can’t wait to see the growth that Jason soon experiences as the word gets out about this fantastic system.
Congratulations to him and his developer who both worked extremely hard. You’re a true internet entrepreneur – rock on!
