We touched on this topic not too long ago in our post Using Autoresponders to Help you Sell and today we are going to take a closer look at how to get started selling digital products to monetize your mailings to generate another income stream.

Most blogs should be able to create a digital product to sell and generate income. While it might be hard to see how this revenue model relates to a mailing list, remember the subscribers on your list have given you permission to contact them via email. Signing up for an email list is a transaction. In this way, your email subscribers are already clients, they just haven’t paid (yet!).

As long as you’ve done the legwork on your part of the relationship, delivering high-value content, you have established a strong, trusting connection between your subscriber and your brand. With digital products, you can turn these individuals into paying clients!

How can I get started selling Digital Content?

Ebooks and email courses are the most popular forms of digital products our publishers promote and sell to their mailing lists. If you are new to offering digital products on your site, here are two different ways to begin introducing the process:

• The Enticement

• Use content on your site that touches people looking to solve a problem or fulfill a need related to your digital product. (How-to posts are great for this!)

• Solve this issue in the content on the site, but offer a free enhancement to that solution. To receive the free enhancement, the reader must submit their email address and confirm their subscription.

• Deliver your freebie with an Autoresponder after the subscription has been confirmed, and in the same email offer your digital product.

• The Bundle Strategy:

• Create small products (short eBooks or printables) and add them to your digital product inventory. While each of these items should be purchasable individually, they will be used to increase the value perception when bundling them together.

• Example: If you had 10 ebooks at $4.95 each, that’s a $49.95 value, however the bundle would be available at a lower price. Remember that you had no actual intention of selling a standalone ebook. If someone buys a single one, that’s just a happy bonus.

• Follow the same method mentioned in the enticement strategy to pitch the bundle. Emphasize this is their only opportunity to purchase at the discounted, bundled price.

• You can also offer this bundle in various other places in your mailings, linking them to Autoresponders as well.

What about my current subscribers?

Never forget about current subscribers! Make them feel special by always offering your list an opportunity to buy from you before officially launching any product on your website. This is also a great way to test a new product’s market potential. If you are about to offer a new free printable, download or eBook, send a Newsflash to your current lists with the content first. As long as you use an autoresponder to deliver the incentive to your new subscribers, you don’t have to worry about duplication.

Brainstorming Time!

• First, list any digital products you have purchased in the past 2-3 years.
• Why did you buy these products? Was it the content? The offer itself?
• Now think about the content on your site. List 3 ways you could use your current content to create a digital product.
• Take it a step further and list 3 new digital products you would like to offer in the future.

And there you have it! Recognize what sparked your interest in purchasing other publisher’s digital content and look at how you can incorporate it into your site. We’re willing to bet you already have at least 3 digital products waiting to be packaged together with the current content on your site. The next step is creating the Autoresponders and Parsers to set it all in motion!

When you begin to sell digital content, the most important aspect is to always deliver on your promises. Each transaction and each email should be one which reaffirms your customer’s trust in you and your product. Test this process in detail to ensure all aspects are in line and processing correctly before you launch it to the world. If you have any questions, or team is here to act as guides and walk you through the setup if needed!

Questions, comments or suggestions on what you’ve read here today? We’d love to hear your feedback! Send us an email at support@feedblitz.com, chat, check out our Help Forum, or give us a call at 1.877.692.5489. Our Support and Sales Desk is available Monday – Friday from 9 am to 5 pm EST.

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Easy enough for a blogger to set up in seconds, powerful enough for sophisticated corporate email campaigns, FeedBlitz is an RSS, Email and Social Automation Tool to take your email marketing to the next level. Visit us online to learn more or start your 30 Day Free Trial!

       

Related Stories

• A Word on Monetizing your Mailings
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Changes and opportunities at this October’s SDN Solutions Showcase.  

In the fall of 2014, ONF debuted the SDN Solutions Showcase with great success. In asking ONF member companies and their customers to demonstrate real SDN solutions to business challenges, these innovative companies showed that SDN was more than theory—there were products and solutions that could be purchased and deployed. During our first SDN Solutions Showcase at the SDN & OpenFlow World Congress, we had 21 companies participate, showing the world that SDN was here to stay!

In 2015, we introduced the aspect of competition into the SDN Solutions Showcase, and gave more visibility to all of the entrants. In addition to writing white papers on the event and shooting several videos, we introduced the “ONF SDN Best in Showcase Award,” voted by the show attendees, in recognition of the most compelling demo at the show. We were thrilled to see the ASPEN OpenSourceSDN.org team win the award—and the interest of more than a few major telecom and content providers.

The ASPEN project, demoed by Fabian Schneider of NEC, won the first-ever “ONF SDN Best in Showcase Award” in 2015, as voted by the conference attendees.

How can we improve in 2016? Let’s make it easier, and let’s increase the opportunity for worldwide visibility of your solutions!

That’s right, we made the entrance registration form only five questions long—and on one page. If you are an ONF member, and you register to have a booth presence at the SDN & OpenFlow World Congress, October 11-14 in The Hague, Netherlands, and you fill out our form (link below) you are in!

To register your company’s SDN solutions (you may enter as many demos as you want), please visit https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/XW9DKQZ. You’ll be added to our list and will be informed over the summer, with conversations ramping up as we near the event in October. We’ll keep the visibility going all summer long with your company articles, your presentations, and getting more “bang for your event buck” in any way possible, and we’ll have an “all-hands” meeting at the ONF Member Workday event this September in Santa Clara.

The demo presented by Huawei was particularly compelling, and came in 2nd in the “ONF SDN Best in Showcase Award.”

In addition to an easier, cleaner entry process, and shorter and more efficient meetings, we’re introducing something that will blow your doors off.

(Are you sitting down?)

(Take a deep breath, please.)

During the middle of September, when we have the regular “dress rehearsal” WebEx for all the participants, our special panel of judges (you’ll meet them soon) will select the “Congress Stage Spotlight” winners—the best two demos presented in the final rehearsal. If your company is one of these two winners, both companies will be awarded  ON THE WORLD CONGRESS STAGE TO PRESENT YOUR DEMO TO THE CONGRESS AUDIENCE! Imagine how much it would cost to get that kind of visibility to the SDN community, to operators, to the press and analyst community!

All you have to do is put together the best demo you can present.

We’ll have more to say on this soon, and we’ve set up a special organizational meeting on June 9 at 9 a.m. Pacific Time. Download this to your calendar.

You will want to be there.

You can have the planning for this high-visibility event DONE before your summer vacation.

You can get maximum visibility for your company’s SDN solution.

You can be the hero.

-  Marc LeClerc (NoviFlow), ONF Market Area Director, and Rick Bauer, ONF SDN Solutions Showcase Producer

Over the past few weeks, we’ve walked you through the process of monetizing your mailings. (Haven’t caught up on those posts? Check them out here!) Today let’s talk about a different form of monetization: The FeedBlitz Affiliate Program

What is the FeedBlitz Affiliate Program?

We know you love our services, and the FeedBlitz Affiliate Program is our way of rewarding you for loving our services and telling your friends about us. To summarize the program, you refer FeedBlitz to your network, they sign up, you earn income. And that’s it!

Our goal is to enhance your relationships by offering to your network the value, customer service and email marketing automation features of FeedBlitz you have come to know so well. Ideal for bloggers, businesses, agencies, virtual assistants and more, the FeedBlitz Affiliate Program is great for any member of the FeedBlitz family! Many of our bloggers and marketing agencies alike have found great value (and received great revenue) from being affiliate partners.

How does the program work?

Once you sign up for the FeedBlitz Affiliate Program, a unique affiliate link, or API, is created which you can use when promoting or recommending our services to others. Please note, this is only one way we track referrals, a quick email to our support staff and we can apply the proper affiliate account as well!

From here, it’s up to you how you wish to proceed in referring our services. You can do so through paid advertising, sponsored posts, content, conference representation, etc. Our team is here to help you in any way possible and have collaborated with our publishers on webcasts, podcasts, instructional content and more.

We use a variety of techniques to track the success of your individual program and affiliate members. Using tactics such as special offer promotional codes and custom landing pages, along with your unique publisher API, we can identify and properly delegate new publishers as they join.

What’s the benefit of joining the FeedBlitz Affiliate Program?

When a new publisher signs up for FeedBlitz, thanks to your efforts, and completes their free 30 day trial, you will then receive a share of their monthly or annual billing cycle. Revenue share rates begin at 10% and increase as high as 40% on all billing fees earned. These percentages are based on the payment tier being billed for the new publisher.

Curious about your earning potential?

Check out our Affiliate Program commission rates and tiers!

There really is no limit to your earning potential with the FeedBlitz Affiliate Program. The more publishers you send our way who utilize our services, the more income generated on your behalf. And all of this taking place without you needing to worry about tracking or payments!  *Because you know how much we like our set-it-and-forget-it way of life here at ‘blitz headquarters!

What else should I know about the program?

Before joining our FeedBlitz Affiliate Program we ask that you please take a moment to read our Terms and Conditions which can be found on our site. This gives you all the minor details, the ins and outs about the program and can answer most of your questions.

A Word for our current Affiliate Program Partners: Referring a service to your friends and network is no small act, and we take great pride in our publisher’s referrals. Your referral is a vote of confidence in our company, services and staff, and it is our duty to exceed the expectations of your network. We want to thank you for trusting us not only with the success of your email marketing, but that of your valued friends and network as well!

Interested in joining our affiliate program but still have a few lingering questions? Send us an email at support@feedblitz.com, chat, check out our Help Forum, or give us a call at 1.877.692.5489. Our Support and Sales Desk is available Monday – Friday from 9 am to 5 pm EST.

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Easy enough for a blogger to set up in seconds, powerful enough for sophisticated corporate email campaigns, FeedBlitz is an RSS, Email and Social Automation Tool to take your email marketing to the next level. Visit us online to learn more or start your 30 Day Free Trial!

       

Related Stories

• How to Start Monetizing Your Mailings
• Monetizing Your Mailings by Selling Digital Content
• A Word on Monetizing your Mailings

 

A recap of the 2016 Spring SDNFV Fest Testing Activity held at the Beijing Internet Institute Global SDN Certified Testing Center. 

The Beijing Internet Institute (BII) recently co-hosted the 2016 Spring SDNFV Fest Testing Activity with ONF and Ixia at the BII Global SDN Certified Testing Center (SDNCTC) in Beijing. The activity highlighted great successes with SDNFV testing and contributions to the development and deployment of SDNFV.

The event was well attended with more than 30 engineers and over 20 pieces of equipment from 16 worldwide enterprises including Accton, Cobham, FiberHome, H3C, Huawei, Ixia, Pica8, Spirent, and many others. This year’s SDNFV Fest Testing Activity was much grander and more mature than before and showed the great force and potential market of SDNFV in China.

Figure 1: SDNFV Fest Testing Activity Spot

During the five days of testing, enterprises mainly focused on five parts:

• OpenFlow v1.3 Protocol Conformance Testing (including control channel, data channel)
• SDN Performance Testing (including OpenFlow controller performance testing, OpenFlow switch performance testing, and VxLAN performance testing)
• SDN Interop Testing (including OpenFlow, VxLAN, etc.)
• NFV Testing (including VNF life circle management, VNF basic function, and interflow between VNF and NFVi)
• SDN/NFV Solution Testing

Enterprises focused on the testing of SDN controller performance and it became a main focus of the whole testing activity. As the core component of the control panel, SDN controller performance affects the functions of the whole SDN Internet. In the testing activity, many enterprises carried out controller performance testing by leveraging the testing tool OpenFlow suite performance, which was developed by SDNCTC independently.

One of the engineers from SDNCTC said, “Controller Performance Testing can help find the performance bottlenecks of equipment such as control channel capacity, topology discovery ability, flow setup rate, etc., to boost the perfection and improvement of devices of enterprises.”

In addition, NFV testing also became a new highlight of SDNFV Fest Testing Activity. Recently, NFV testing has become more and more popular in many enterprises. Of the testing activity, two enterprises – Certus and FiberHome – carried out the NFV testing, which includes vBras, vCPE, vRouter, vFW, etc.

Figure 2: SDNFV Fest Testing Activity Spot

The SDNFV Fest Testing Activity was spoken highly of by engineers from enterprises in attendance. One Huawei engineer said, “The testing activity is very successful and is highly involved. The enterprises can learn a lot from each other`s advantages and discuss technology problems and solutions together in this great platform SDNCTC provided with.” Engineers from other enterprises also gave great praise to the testing activity and looked forward to more high-qualified testing activities like this.

SDNFV Fest Testing Activity is full of success and significance to accelerate the development and deployment of SDNFV. It can be a place where devices of all enterprises are tested. The event also enables engineers to gather together and discuss SDN specifications, technologies, and testing results.

Following the recent testing activity, BII is hosting the Global SDNFV Tech Conference in Beijing, taking place on June 1 – 2. During the event, the organization will publish whitepapers and solution briefs providing insight into the recent testing activity to further the deployment of SDNFV. This content will be available here and we encourage you take a look at these documents to gain a deeper understanding of the impact SDNFV is having within the industry.

- Pan Zhang, senior engineer, BII

The good news is, nothing material has changed. FeedBlitz is continuing to adhere to the same high standards we set ourselves from the start, in terms of both how we run our business and our obligations to you, our users.

The better news is, the updated privacy policy is I think not only clearer, it’s actually helpful, in that it contains things like links to third party sites where you can control how third party services we use (such as Google Analytics) treat your information. Light reading it is not, but it’s not exactly “War and Peace” either. If you care about how information about you is collected and used, it’s worth a read.

In more or less plain English, this is what our updated privacy policy says:

• You have the right to control your personal information.
• FeedBlitz never sells, rents or buys email addresses.
• List owners can see the information you give them as part of our services.
• FeedBlitz uses cookies, tracking and logging to make FeedBlitz work and tell list owners about activity on their lists.
• FeedBlitz emails globally, but is a US-based business with a US-based infrastructure.

So why update it? Well, periodically, we review what we do and how we do it. As part of that process, our lawyers urged us to update our privacy policy to be both clearer, and to reflect modern realities. For example, the part about our servers being in the US turns out to be fairly important for non-US users. We didn’t have that before.

Anyway, lawyers are expensive (but for good reason), and it seems silly to waste all that money! You can find our freshly updated privacy policy here.

       

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Dan Pitt shares highlights from Light Reading’s Big Communications Event.

Light Reading’s Big Telecom Event of past years transformed into the Big Communications Event (BCE) in 2016. Held in Austin, it highlighted what operators are currently doing (not just planning to do), shared experiences with SDN and NFV, and discussed NFV MANO – an ETSI-ISG NFV working group that focuses on allowing flexible on-boarding. One of our training partners held an SDN certification class, we hosted an ONF workshop (more about that later), and we co-sponsored a Women in Communications half-day event. My schedule was certainly packed with opportunities for exciting industry dialogue!

Among the many keynotes and sessions on the BCE agenda, two of my favorites were from ONF board member Axel Clauberg (Deutsche Telekom) and the head of the “Ocean” initiative at ONF member company Vodafone, David Amzallag.

In his lead keynote, Axel described his experience with SDN, NFV, and NFV MANO. Something that stood out to me is the success Deutsche Telekom is having with their pan-European network “Pan-Net” (which won an award the night before) to help unify their 13 European operating company processes with cloudification as well as open source software and hardware.

David addressed transport SDN with IP and optical end-to-end orchestration and assurance during his keynote, and he noted that network cloudification, SDN, and NFV are essential for 5G. According to his presentation, Vodafone is buying only cloud-native applications and they will no longer be using the term OSS, but will instead talk about specific functions and orchestration.

The panel I participated on, “Open Source: A Reality Check,” was moderated by Roz Roseboro of Heavy Reading. Other panelists included Marc Collier, COO at OpenStack; Heather Kirksey, director at OPNFV; Lauren Cooney, the head of open source at Cisco; and Randy Nicklas, CTO of Windstream. We discussed how telecom has embraced open source in its move to the cloud, and the increasing activity of telcos in the open source community as participants, contributors, and creators.

I am a bit biased, but perhaps the most thrilling workshop of the week was our “SDNFV: Out of the Silos and Into the Field” workshop. China Mobile, PCCW Global, CableLabs, and Verizon spoke during the workshop, and we hosted a panel about “orchestrator wars” (or the increasing activity in open source orchestrators). The focus shifts higher and higher as we settle plumbing and control plane issues, and we get to where applications and orchestration really reflect particular business uses of the network. In short, we are getting closer to the business value that SDN and NFV bring to network operators.

During the workshop, we also addressed SDNFV – an acronym that we first introduced at the Layer123 NFV World Congress in April. We dove into how often SDN and NFV are discussed simultaneously, with NFV now supported by a foundation of SDN, and leading operators are now placing their bets with real investment in actual deployment. We had great attendance, including BCE General Chair and Light Reading Editor-At-Large Carol Wilson and Heavy Reading Principal Analyst of Cloud and NFV Caroline Chappell among the crowd.

If you’re interested in learning more about SDNFV (and who wouldn’t be?), be sure to catch my upcoming contributed article for Light Reading on the topic. In the meantime, check out the ONF blog later this week to read a post from NXP Semiconductors’ Shweta Latawa about the Women in Communications half-day event at BCE – her post is coming soon!

What were some of your highlights from Light Reading’s BCE? Tell us in the comments below, or tweet us at @openflow.

- Dan Pitt, Executive Director

Your publishing capabilities are so much more than sending automatic emails powered by your RSS feed, and we want to make sure you’re maximizing all the publishing capabilities we have to offer! Over the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring these capabilities here on the FeedBlitz Blog.

First up in our series, we’re going to explore one of our most recently released features: FeedBlitz Groups! We are always striving to bring you the latest features and capabilities in email marketing, and know you will be really pleased with this added feature.

What are Groups?

Groups are a new feature within the FeedBlitz publisher’s platform.

Not associated with any list in your account, a group is a separate, static list of emails. To create a group you can import emails, manually type them in, or add subscribers from a list with our move/copy feature. Your subscribers won’t receive a notification when they are being added to a group as this feature is purely for publisher use.

What are some ways I can use Groups in my email marketing?

If you’re ready to take your email marketing to the next level and begin target marketing your subscribers, groups are here to help you make it happen. With groups you can:

• Pull subscribers who have opened a particular set of emails or clicked a select link in an email. This will help you narrow down those who are interested in a specific category or offer, information you can use to target these individuals directly in the future.

• House subscribers who have previously purchased a product or completed a course. If you use one mailing list for sales pitches, create a group for those individuals who’ve purchased and you no longer want to pitch them on a particular product. We can assist you in setting up triggers for the subscriber to be automatically removed from a mailing list and added to this group.

• Create a group of inactive subscribers as opposed to a separate list. When performing list hygiene, we often delete those subscribers no longer active in our list. Now you can create a group for these emails which will not affect your pricing tier.

• Easily exclude or include subscribers from a mailing. You are able to use groups when sending On Demand or Newsflash emails under the Audience Inclusion and Audience Suppression tabs. Groups further narrow down or widen the scope of who will receive targeted emails without risk of a single subscriber receiving duplicate emails.

• Use custom fields and tags on your subscription forms to create groups based on subscriber location. This is especially handy if you travel for speaking events, host conferences, or have multiple locations and offices.

Take some time over this next week to explore our new groups feature, even brainstorm different ways groups can help enhance your email marketing efforts. If you come up with a brilliant way to utilize groups, or even find yourself having great success using one of the methods we mentioned above, please send us an email to let us know! Your idea or success could be featured in one of our FeedBlitz social channels or in our Knowledge Base Support Forum.

Ready to get started utilizing groups in your account but want a little more information? Send us an email at support@feedblitz.com, chat, check out our Help Forum, or give us a call at 1.877.692.5489. Our Support and Sales Desk is available Monday – Friday from 9 am to 5 pm EST.

-•-

Easy enough for a blogger to set up in seconds, powerful enough for sophisticated corporate email campaigns, FeedBlitz is an RSS, Email and Social Automation Tool to take your email marketing to the next level. Visit us online to learn more or start your 30 Day Free Trial!

       

Related Stories

• Are you a FeedBlitz Affiliate?
• Monetizing Your Mailings by Selling Digital Content
• A Word on Monetizing your Mailings