The other day I spend a good amount of time looking for ways to monetize video online for one of my clients.
She is good at her work, doing videos mainly on cooking specialty dishes that you normally don’t get outside. The videos, she informs, are aimed at roping in moneyed customers for her thriving catering business.
That sounds good to me because I feel reasonably assured that if her business flourishes, a lot of credit will flow to her videos, and in turn to my video production course.
Smart that she is, it doesn’t take her long to understand the nuances of making web video as she goes through the course on video production. She does some pretty informative videos – she is a good picker of alien knowledge I must say – mostly punching PowerPoint slideshows with videocam movies.
And then…the idea takes root. How about selling the videos online? Just fine, why not, I say to her.
But saying is one, coming up with a good solution is quite another. As is always the case, several factors crisscross one another. My client wants not one, not two, but at least 3 to 4 solutions to choose from.
The task is cut out for me, and I kind of realize that I need good details of the available options for selling video online before I can present them for her decision.
It takes me a little time, but here is a list of 5 solutions, an admixture of easy and not-so-easy ones that I prepare for my client.
Let me begin with the easy ones.
Sell Through PayPal
One of the easiest ways of selling downloadable products like online video is through PayPal. It is easy to setup a PayPal account, but more importantly it is convenient and reassuring to sell through PayPal.
In PayPal’s words: Website Payments Standard is our fastest way to set up online payment on your website and accept credit cards, debit cards, bank transfers, and PayPal.
There is no money to be paid to setup PayPal WPS, and there is no monthly fee or cancellation fee either. However PayPal deducts transaction fees when you make a sale.
Dr Ralph Wilson has a ready reckoner on how to use PayPal for the purpose. Let me reproduce below the salient points in ‘his words’ rather than rewording myself:
- Set up a password protected directory on your site. If you don’t know how, check with your hosting service. Nearly all hosts allow this. [Tip: You can password-protect part or whole of your WordPress blog (if using) with suitable plugin(s)]
- Give this directory a name made up of seemingly random numbers and letters, such as /b596798x22.
- Invent a username and password for this directory made of a jumble of letters and numbers also, such as username: 4339278x, password: t220792. Be aware that a numeral one (1) could be mistaken for a lower-case “L”.
- Upload your digital content and give it a meaningful name followed by 4 or 5 jumbled letters and numbers, such as highlights070x1.pdf or dreamtide99s4.mp4.
- Use PayPal “Website Payments Standard” to receive payments, with a “Buy Now” button for each product according to the instructions on the site.
- When you receive an e-mail from PayPal indicating that payment has been made, immediately send the purchaser a pre-prepared e-mail containing the URL on your website, the username and password, and a request not to pass the information on.
ClickBank – A Popular Destination
ClickBank is a popular selling platform for e-products like online video, both among new and seasoned sellers. The advantages are many, the most important being the massive affiliate network that ClickBank enjoys and puts to good use.
There is a one-time per-product activation fee of $49.95, and some simple guides to follow as you start selling your video through ClickBank.
Commissions are deducted for every sale because remember ClickBank’s USP is its huge number of ‘foot soldiers’ or affiliates who will sell on your behalf.
There are instances where affiliates – pulling in incomes by selling several products – earn more than the average product seller. Who knows maybe this prompts you to rather start selling others’ products than making your own products for ClickBank (grin).
Notice you can lay hands on your ClickBank earnings through your PayPal account especially when you have recurring billing. ClickBank accepts credit card payments on your behalf, and releases that after certain conditions are met.
Make sure you read all that is given at ClickBank Help Center to understand how things work.
E-Junkie’s Versatile Solution
Similar to ClickBank there are a good number of solutions like PayLoadz, tradebit, and others but let me turn attention to E-junkie Shopping Cart.
There are many facets of putting E-junkie to use considering that you can automate your selling in conjunction with ClickBank, Google Checkout, PayPal Standard, and 2CheckOut among others.
What many people like about selling digital items on E-junkie is its integration with such entities as SwiftCD and AWeber. Read the details here.
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SwiftCD – The ‘Tangible’ Approach
I have mentioned SwiftCD above. How does it help?
In its own words: At SwiftCD, we create custom CDs and DVDs one at a time, and ship them world-wide directly to your customers.
This means at SwiftCD you can arrange ‘tangible’ sale of your video in the form of CD/DVD instead of digital download. You may feel why this is needed.
Most marketers will suggest that you cater to all selling avenues. For example, when I buy a software I go for immediate digital download (available anyway) and I also pay for the CD/DVD version sent by mail.
Thus an effective marketing strategy will be to sell your video both in digitally downloadable format and in CD/DVD.
Look now at the SwiftCD advantage. Once you upload your video content to SwiftCD and have selling setup in your website (or maybe elsewhere), you have no further bother about things like making CD/DVD, maintaining inventory (a disk is made only when an order is placed), fulfilling orders, and so on.
You can setup SwiftCD with E-junkie (mentioned above), and more importantly also with PayPal to seamlessly synchronize the entire selling process.
I have made the video above that deals on SwiftCD.
Sell In Amazon CreateSpace
This one may be a clincher. If you feel only the most successful ‘blockbusters’ sell on Amazon, you may be in for a surprise. You too have a place under Amazon’s umbrella even if you have never published any work anywhere.
Similar to SwiftCD’s approach Amazon too offers the same method of selling your video (or book, or e-book, or music for that matter).
Amazon is perhaps the biggest marketplace of its kind, so let me not go into the merits of selling here because it is too obvious why you should.
The route to Amazon is via CreateSpace. Its free online publishing tools and Community can help you self-publish and distribute your video.
This is what Amazon has to say about CreateSpace:
CreateSpace provides one of the easiest, fastest and most economical ways to self-publish and make your content available to millions of potential customers on Amazon.com and other channels. Media formats supported through CreateSpace include books, DVDs, CDs, video downloads and Amazon MP3s.
Conclusion
Indeed there are different ways for my client to sell her videos online.
Take the simplest. As in the first case she can just ask her buyer to first pay money to her PayPal account (or send it to her bank account), and only after that she can let him access the link to the video sold to him by manually sending an email.
Looks easy, but critics feel it may not be a longer term solution. Why?
Remember the buyer will not get his buy until my client manually sends it through the email which may be several hours after the payment has been received. The question is, will the buyer wait that long?
Perhaps not, unless my client’s video is so uniquely proprietary that the buyer will not mind the troubles to get it.
In most cases this is seldom true. Which in other words is to say that the more windows you keep open for selling your video online, the more is the chance of earning money for your labor.
Isn’t that the main thing we care for? You bet!
 This article of October 8th, 2009 is authored by Partha Bhattacharya, who runs this website. Catering to the clients' video needs aside, Partha also writes guest articles for other web publications. |
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