The Zana Zen

This guide provides detailed information on how to sell your own digital products by yourself, by digital products I mean: ebooks, software, graphics, etc… digital files. I’ll show you, step by step, the easy way to sell a digital file, I’ll describe to you how PayPal works and how to use PayPal’s IPN (Instant Payment Notification) service into your advantage in order to send your digital products automatically when you receive payments from your customers. Passive income, here we come

This guide is focused on absolute beginners, if you feel you can skip some of these sections, it won’t hurt my feelings

Choose Your Hosting Service

A Hosting service allows an individual to host his files (usually a website) on a server, in exchange for a monthly or a yearly payment. I’m using Hostgator as my hosting service and I’m really satisfied, you can also try to check if this coupon still works: “freetrial”.

Be sure that you get what you need from your hosting service so ask questions and read what they offer, it can be MySQL databases, PHP scripting, Python, CGI, etc…

Choose a Good Domain Name

In choosing a domain name you have 3 options:

• Going for a brand name, the advantage here is that your site will be more reliable, a brand name is a name to trust on. An example will be www.amazon.com
• Going for a more generic name, if your site is small and you do not plan to spend a lot of money on advertising then I guess this option is better for you – its advantage is that your site will be found more quickly by search engines. An example will be www.FreeWebsiteTemplates.com
• This method is just the combination of the last two, just create a brand name that contains two words or a derivative. This is the best choice of the three in my opinion

Your domain name will eventually be controlled by the DNS network protocol.

What is DNS?

DNS is an acronym for Domain Name System. It is a method of conversion between IP addresses, which are difficult to remember, to domain names, which are easier to use and remember. When your computer tries to connect to a remote computer by using a domain name, it needs first to resolve the remote computer’s IP address.

All connections throughout the Internet are done using the IP network protocol, the IP protocol identifies each computer by a unique IP address. An IP address is a 32 bit number which is represented in the following way: “aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd”, where each dotted separated bin is a number between 0 to 255.

In order to resolve the IP address from a domain name, there is a need for a DNS server. A DNS Server is a computer that is connected to the Internet and responds to DNS queries. Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) provides you with a DNS server, your computer probably queries it.

How To Setup the DNS Settings?

Now that you have a domain name, you should setup your DNS settings, if you don’t know how to do that, then you should contact the technical support of your domain registrar. In the settings, make sure you set the right values for the MX record of the DNS, it should be set to your hosting mail server, and it will let you receive emails to your domain name.

Also add some sub domains that will let you manage your hosting more easily:

• ftp.your-domain.com – should point to your hosting FTP server.
• mail.your-domain.com – should point to your hosting mail server.

Getting Money From Buyers using PayPal

I presume that you know what PayPal is, and that you have used it some time in your life, I won’t cover the basics here. PayPal offers some merchant tools, the one that we will talk about is the buy now button. If you sell something, your website should describe the features & benefits of your product and contain a buy now button at the bottom.

When your customers push this button, they will be redirected to PayPal for checkout, after they will pay, you will receive a payment notification from PayPal. The Buy Now Button is the most common merchant tool that PayPal has to offer, it’s simple, fast and secure. It’s easy to configure too. Actually, the button is a simple HTML form that POSTs (sends) data (like the price of the product and the name of the product, see for a list below) to PayPal. A Buy Now Button could also be encrypted with PayPal’s public key, so it prevents hackers from seeing the button details.

A standard Buy Now Button’s form contains these fields:

• business – who to pay for. This is the seller’s email address, your email address that you use to login to PayPal.
• item_name – the product’s name. When the customer clicks the Buy Now button, he will be redirected to PayPal to purchase your product, item_name is the name of the product that will be displayed at PayPal.
• amount – the product’s price.
• currency_code – states what currency to use, where “USD” identifies US Dollars.
• return – the URL that the customer will return to when he is done paying.
• cancel_return – the URL that the customer will be redirected to if he presses cancel after he is redirected to PayPal.
• notify_url – this is optional, it states the URL that receives a payment notifications from Paypal using the IPN service, read more below.

How Paypal’s IPN (Instant Payment Notification) Works?

1. When a user are pressing on your buy now button, he will be redirected to PayPal.
2. PayPal receives the payments and POSTs the payment details to your IPN URL you specified in the notify_url parameter.
3. Your notification url should be a web script that will validate the request against PayPal (security measurement).
4. PayPal IPN responds and verifies the payment or denies it. The IPN script should processes only valid payment requests.
5. The PayPal IPN script should send your digital product by email to your customers automatically, unless passive income doesn’t interest you and you wish to send it manually every time by yourself

EasyIPN

EasyIPN is a script that lets you automate online orders, protect your products from distribution and manage everything from a simple admin panel. You may wish to you use it if you don’t want to mess with the PayPal settings by yourself. EasyIPN’s responsibility is to offload the work you need to do in order to integrate with PayPal IPN.

EasyIPN will send your digital product to the purchaser without your intervention, thus making your website a true passive income source.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 11:21 pm and is filed under random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.