Every day as you create content, do you design with print or ‘pad in mind?  That is a real conversation for most companies and organizations today.  You may think the answer is “both” but, already some have decided to move towards the digital design first.

     “The next redesign of our titles will see them redesigned with our tablet versions in mind,” magazine publisher Future’s tablet editor-in-chief Mike Goldsmith told an industry forum this month.

He is not the only one,

     Tap!, is sized to match iPad dimensions. That was a no-brainer (after all, Tap! is all about apps). But many other magazines, too, are now published in a secondary, miniature form factor that increasingly references the tablet’s own.

Jeff Hayes over at InfoBlog got me thinking a bit with his latest installment.  Jeff does a roundup of news in a number of areas of publishing (books, magazines, and newspapers) and comes to the following conclusions:

     The publishing industry continues to shift to a digital model. Yes, print still accounts for the majority of revenue and volume, and there may be an increase in print-based volume and revenue as the economy recovers. However, I believe digital growth will continue to significantly outpace print and, in the increasingly foreseeable future, overtake print.

     Equipment vendors, paper manufacturers, and print service providers need to take a hard look at their business strategy and identify new opportunities for growth. Within the “cross media” publishing industry key areas will include workflow, integration, and managed services (hosting, search engine optimization, digital asset management, etc.). It might be a good time to use your cash flow to finance an acquisition or two.

The balance between cost and usability are significant variables when considering if you will be designing with digital in mind.

The Design

The differences not only lie in the size and the dimensions of the page, but also in the interactive features present in the design the document its self.  Adding links to supporting articles, inserting voice over elements to explain illustrations.  Inserting a video instead of a picture are just some of the elements that we are seeing when designing with Digital in mind.

In fact, here is a tutorial showing you how to take your design from print to digital design http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/tutorials/?featureid=3289322#1

The Cost

How much does the printing cost?  What is the cost of the ink, the printer and the paper.  How long will each page last and when others want to see the content, will there be another reprint?  What is the cost of digital?  Where do you store it, where do you display it and how do you deliver it?  There are numerous websites, programs and platforms that are pushing for you to use them.  But the question remains, do you want to put your content out there with just another service, or do you want it syndicated, protected, and delivered at the highest quality next to all your other content.

At some point you’ve probably heard about or used Amazon’s web services. Some of their more popular offerings are simple storage service S3 and Cloudfront. A utility service for storage and bandwidth that you can use on-demand. It’s free to signup and then you pay as you go. Here is their pricing or use their free tier for 12 months if you’re a new user.

DailyDigital was built as an easy, intuitive tool for managing digital content in the Amazon Cloud. Whether you’re looking to open a Content Store to present content to your audience or just a way to leverage Amazon’s cloud for content storage and management, DailyDigital is a tool worth considering.

1. Connect To Your Amazon S3 Account

DailyDigital connects directly to your Amazon S3 account. If you don’t have an Amazon account, we’ll quickly show you how to set one up. All you need are the two access keys Amazon provides for your account at aws.amazon.com and you’ll be ready to start uploading

content.

2. Upload Your Digital Content

To upload new content to your Amazon S3 account from your computer, you can use the DailyDigital Uploader directly in your bowser. It automatically takes care of creating the correct file permissions and allows you to give each file a title, description and tags to help you better organize your files after they’ve been uploaded.

3. Manage Your Digital Content

The DailyDigital content manger makes it easy to manage all your digital content in the Amazon cloud. It intelligently organizes your files by content type ; video, audio, image, docs, other files. Interacting in realtime with Amazon S3, the DailyDigital content manager is an intuitive way to manage your files in the Amazon cloud. Preview your content, change file names and other file details.

4. Deliver Your Digital Content

DailyDigital doesn’t stop with helping you organize and mange your files though. We’ve engineered beautiful Content Stores to deliver your content directly to your audience on Facebook, your website and you can use to deliver all your digital content directly to your audience on facebook, website or any other webpage.

You can assemble digital collections from any fo your content to be offered via your Content Store. Mix and match videos with pdf’s, audio with images to create dynamic digital products. The DailyDigital system also takes care of video transcoding so you never have to worry about your content showing up cross platform and device. It’s the only content management and delivery system your content will ever need.

5. Present & Monetize Access To Your Digital Content

DailyDigital presents content via beautiful and social Content Stores. Your audience can browse, view, preview, review and purchase access to stream and download your content exactly how you decide. Easy to install on Facebook, your website or any other web-page, this is a major innovation in content presentation.

In addition, if you have content you’d like to monetize, content stores let you instantly charge for access to your streaming or downloadable content. Just pick the price point and paypal account you’d like to receive the funds and you’re done. If selling your digital content on facebook or your website is part of your content strategy, DailyDigital makes it easy to present and monetize that content directly out of your Amazon S3 account.

6. Get Started

Take advantage of the fact that we are stillin Beta and create a free account today at www.dailydigital.com.

Amazon S3 File Management

At some point you’ve probably heard about or used Amazon’s web services. Some of their more popular offerings are simple storage service S3 and Cloudfront. A utility service for storage and bandwidth that you can use on-demand. It’s free to signup and then you pay as you go. Here is their pricing or use their free tier for 12 months if you’re a new user.

DailyDigital was built as an easy, intuitive tool for managing digital content in the Amazon Cloud. Whether you’re looking to open a Content Store to present content to your audience or just a way to leverage Amazon’s cloud for content storage and management, DailyDigital is a tool worth considering.

1. Connect To Your Amazon S3 Account

DailyDigital connects directly to your Amazon S3 account. If you don’t have an Amazon account, we’ll quickly show you how to set one up. All you need are the two access keys Amazon provides for your account at aws.amazon.com and you’ll be ready to start uploading content.

2. Upload Your Digital Content

To upload new content to your Amazon S3 account from your computer, you can use the DailyDigital Uploader directly in your bowser. It automatically takes care of creating the correct file permissions and allows you to give each file a title, description and tags to help you better organize your files after they’ve been uploaded.

3. Manage Your Digital Content

The DailyDigital content manger makes it easy to manage all your digital content in the Amazon cloud. It intelligently organizes your files by content type ; video, audio, image, docs, other files. Interacting in realtime with Amazon S3, the DailyDigital content manager is an intuitive way to manage your files in the Amazon cloud. Preview your content, change file names and other file details.

4. Deliver Your Digital Content

DailyDigital doesn’t stop with helping you organize and mange your files though. We’ve engineered beautiful Content Stores to deliver your content directly to your audience on Facebook, your website and you can use to deliver all your digital content directly to your audience on facebook, website or any other webpage.

You can assemble digital collections from any fo your content to be offered via your Content Store. Mix and match videos with pdf’s, audio with images to create dynamic digital products. The DailyDigital system also takes care of video transcoding so you never have to worry about your content showing up cross platform and device. It’s the only content management and delivery system your content will ever need.

5. Present & Monetize Access To Your Digital Content

DailyDigital presents content via beautiful and social Content Stores. Your audience can browse, view, preview, review and purchase access to stream and download your content exactly how you decide. Easy to install on Facebook, your website or any other web-page, this is a major innovation in content presentation.

In addition, if you have content you’d like to monetize, content stores let you instantly charge for access to your streaming or downloadable content. Just pick the price point and paypal account you’d like to receive the funds and you’re done. If selling your digital content on facebook or your website is part of your content strategy, DailyDigital makes it easy to present and monetize that content directly out of your Amazon S3 account.

6. Get Started

Take advantage of the fact that we are stillin Beta and create a free account today at www.dailydigital.com.

The SAP has already contributed to DailyDigital’s story as they’ve brought together a coalition of mentors, advisors, funders, major corporations and serviceproviders to deliver strategic and substantive resources to help entrepreneurs start and scale companies. Regardless of where you’re at as a startup, they provide some customized resources that help answer questions, get you discounts on services and more importantly, give you the feeling that you’re not in it alone.

If you’re a startup, in America, be sure to check out their site at http://www.startupamericapartnership.org/

There are plenty of solutions to sell physical goods online. E-commerce stores, shopping carts, sales sites, online malls, the list is huge. Where does that leave content creators thought? They just have digital content they’d need to sell and deliver?

Do a quick search for “digital content store” and you’ll quickly discover the number of options our there. Zero. Yes, there are services that let you sell a download. Plenty of shopping carts and little apps with that feature. However, they aren’t designed to leverage the power of your digital content, specifically video content, to engage and monetize your audience on facebook, your website and any other web page you control.

So Why Digital Content Stores?

When we decided to build DailyDigital we didn’t just take an existing e-commerce website design and regurgitate it into a quick product. We spent months looking at all the great apps, platforms and solutions that make content consumption easy and incentive audiences to pay for access. Then we looked at how hard it was or impossible in many cases for content creators to take advantage of  those leading apps, platforms and solutions. Sometimes it was in-compatibility or costs. Most of the time it was due to restrictions. A solution designed to empower the content creators and their personal brand wasn’t something we discovered. Finally we identified some of bottle necks in usability that prevent great content creators for even trying to get their content online…and started working on the solution we coined as the DailyDigital Content Store.

So What Exactly is a Digital Content Store?

DailyDigital is the definition of a content store. More specifically it is a social e-commerce solution for your professional videos, audio, images, docs and other digital files. Your audience can browse, view and purchase access to stream and download your content directly from your Facebook page or website. The idea of offering and selling “access” to content instead of just downloads is a key differentiator between a content store and an e-commerce cart that has tacked on digital content as another product type. Specifically, DailyDigital Content Stores let you stream access to audio and video content. This allows for greater protection, engagement and most importantly monetization on facebook and other webpages. Digital content stores are a catalyst for content creators to innovate their content strategy and business model. You can of course still offer downloads, but streaming high end, exclusive content and charging for access to that streaming content is the future of content delivery.

How Can I Open A Free Digital Content Store?

Part of good e-commerce is making it affordable easy enough to let the goods flow. That’s why we made it free to create a DailyDigital Content Store. You can launch your storefront at www.dailydigital.com. Just hook up your Amazon S3 account with the files you’d like to deliver, install your storefront on facebook and your website and open your digital content store. If you decide to sell access to content, everything is a 85/15 revenue share. You keep 85% of everything you sell. It’s never been easier to monetize your content on facebook and your website. Organize, Monetize, Engage.

We’ve been working over the past couple weeks on a video to guide you from start to finish on how to setup and launch your digital content storefronts. DailyDigital Quick Start is now available. You’ll find the complete video on the Welcome screen when you login to your account as well as dailydigital.com or in our On-demand Training page. You notice there we are using none other than our own DailyDigital storefront to power the experience.

User Education via your DailyDigital storefront

Since we’re using our own platform for user education, I wanted to quickly mention how we put DailyDigital Quick start incase you need to put something similar together. Here are the key pieces.

• Step 1 was to write a script outlining everything we needed to cover. It always helps to break the narrative into pieces. Makes it easier for users to skip around to different sections later on.
• Step 2 was to record the narrative. For something quick we use a Blue usb mic which has great sonic quality for the price. We are using screenflow for most of our tutorial video production these days. So recording the audio through there is the easy route.
• Step 3 was to record the screen captures. Following the audio narrative, this goes much more quickly. Screenflow make this quick and painless. Some people like to record all the captures at once and then assemble. Our preference is grab once piece at a time and import it to the editing timeline. It’s easier to make any last minute changes this way.
• Step 4 was to tighten up all the edits and add a sound track. We use Tiffany Thompson’s new single Let it Break Through. You can check it out in her DailyDigital storefront on her website or facebook
• Step 5 was to export the entire video and then each individual section as unique video files
• Step 6, we assembled the videos into a collection in DailyDigital and published the collection to our DailyDigital storefront. Since we use both the embed storefront on our website and the facebook storefont, instantly it was available to our online audience.

Since the release of DailyDigital Storefronts for Facebook, we’ve received  a tons of questions about our competition and value proposition. We love these types of questions because it gives us a chance to address the specific ways we can help our clients engage and monetize their audience on facebook, their websites and across the web. Here are a couple key differentiators of DailyDigital compared to other “storefront” services…specifically as it relates to f-commerce.

It’s All About Digital Content

If you do a search for “facebook storefronts” in google you’ll find a couple services that make it very easy for you to launch an e-commerce storefront on facebook. A quick look at their features and you realize the service they provide is all about physical goods fulfillment. This is the big differentiator between DailyDigital Storefronts and the other Storefronts available.

DailyDigital Storefronts are all about the digital content. From the ground up over the past 18 months we’ve  prototyped, tested, prototyped again, tested again and have now delivered an e-commerce system that is built from the ground up for DIGITAL CONTENT. Instead of just adding on digital downloads to an existing e-commerce storefront, we designed a new platform that empowers digital content creators to engage and monetize their audiences both on Facebook and their other web pages.

Access vs Downloads

DailyDigital’s singular focus is about “access” to content, not just offering downloads. That means you can launch a pay-per-access model for streaming content. It’s like your own on-demand-netflix, but just for the content you decide to offer to your audience at the price point you choose. Your content can be offered by download as well, but DailyDigital Storefronts really shine when monetizing access specifically to video and audio content.

Some Cool DailyDigital Storefront Examples

Here are some very cool new DailyDigital Storefronts that have been launched on Facebook.

• Consultants
• Artists
• Non-Profits
• Authors

Revenue Streams

Revenue streams on the Internet are like glaciers. Some are receding and some are advancing but they are always in constant motion. Knowing which revenue streams are receding can help avert pending financial disaster. Imagine if AOL had responded years earlier to the reality that Internet Access fees were a receding revenue stream. They could be in a much different position today.

Digital content in the form of music, video, movies, books and magazines have all experienced commoditization over the past years. If you are a digital content creator ask yourself this question.  “How can I make money if my content is free?” If you don’t have any answers, now is a great time to think long and hard about coming up with some creative additional revenue streams that are advancing not receding.

5 ways to monetize FREE

1) Exclusive experiences

If you are an artist, author, musician or all of the above, offer your fans an exclusive experience that brings them closer to you in a new way.

2) Access to exclusive content

Subscription communities that give access to special content and   merchandise have been around for awhile. Think about ways you can bring this concept to your   fan base.

3) Merchandising of brands/content

Sure you are a content creator but merchandising your brand and content in ways  that are relevant to you and your audience can go a long way.

4) Custom and personalized products

Content that is personalized and/or custom created is valuable and it’s worth considering if it fits into your product mix.

5) Convenience

iTunes is a great example of how people will pay for convenience. Explore ways  you may be able to package and deliver your content that makes it super convenient for your fans.

Your Thoughts

Can you think of any more advancing revenue streams to add to this list?

More about the author

Rosie Hausler is senior principal consultant and founder of SandhillPR. She has been a VP of Marketing for three Silicon Valley SaaS/Cloud companies, and has worked successfully with startups as well as larger companies such as Cisco, Red Hat, and Tandem Computers.

Rosie was one of the key members of the management team that built up Junglee, the first comparison shopping site on the web, later acquired by Amazon. Contact her at info@sandhillpr.com - www.sandhillpr.com

The reality is that not many companies, especially in the small/medium business sector have started to figure out how to leverage the Facebook platform to reach its 750M users. The team over at SMI put together a fantastic info graphic to tell this stats story. Check it out here.

Brands, companies and individuals are realizing that engaging and monetizing their audience on Facebook needs to be a strategic part of their e-commerce strategy. The goal is to turn “like into buy” as the writers at Booz.com so elequnetly lay out in the report :  “Turning “Like” to “Buy” Social Media Emerges as a Commerce Channel”.

So where does digital content fit into the f-commerce landscape? How can content creators jump start the social commerce side to their content business? Well…our team at DailyDigital has worked for the past 9 months to not just answer this question, but provide a complete social commerce solution designed just for digital content. Earlier this week at DEMO Fall we released our solution : DailyDigital Facebook Storefronts.

Step 1 : sign up for a free account on dailydigital.com. You can deliver content for free and if you choose to monetize access, we revenue share with you 85/15.

Step 2 : hook up your Amazon S3 or FTP hosting account with the digital content you’d like to deliver.

Step 3 : create digital collections to populate your storefront with.

Step 4 : install your DailyDigital Storefront on your Facebook page.

Step 5 : watch your audience engagement and monetization go through the roof as the purchase access, tell their friends and those friends click through to your Facebook page where they can preview and purchase access. The social commerce circle is complete for your digital content.

You can check out a couple really cool new DailyDigital Facebook StoreFronts to see for yourself. Then take a tour of our whole platform here.

• Tiffany Thompson : Recording Artist
• Denai Downs Vaughn : Consultant & Motivational Speaker

We are super excited to have been selected to participate in DEMO Fall this year. DEMO has a 20-year heritage of introducing game-changing new technology products to the world and serves the entire ecosystem of technology innovation, from initial product concept to products ready for introduction into the market. The conference provides an environment for demonstrating companies to secure venture funding, establish critical business relationships, influence early adopters and meet with top tier press.

At DEMO we are going to be releasing our much anticipated Storefronts for Facebook that will let anyone sell and deliver digital content directly to their audience from their own Facebook page. Digital F-commerce is an emerging market that DailyDigital will help content creators take advantage of in new ways. So…be sure to get signed up for a free account at www.dailydigital.com, stock your storefront with a bunch of great digital collections, and then on Sept 14th you can instantly launch your storefront on Facebook.

More Info About DEMO

Produced by IDG Enterprise in conjunction with VentureBeat, the DEMO conferences in the United States and China focus on emerging technologies and new product innovations, which are hand selected from across the spectrum of the technology marketplace. The DEMO conferences have earned their reputation for consistently identifying tomorrow’s cutting-edge technologies, and have served as launch pad events for companies such as Palm, E*Trade, Salesforce, Webex, Tivo and VMware, helping them to secure venture funding, establish critical business relationships, and influence early adopters. For more information on the DEMO conferences, visithttp://www.demo.com/.