Top 5 Ways to Protect Your Paid Digital Goods from Illegal Sharing

The Problems of Having Unprotected Thank You Pages and Download Links

If your business involves selling digital products, then you’ll need to know as much as you can about protecting your download links. Otherwise, you will find that your customers will avoid paying you and download your product for free, causing you a huge loss.

What you should have is a secure, encrypted link that should have a definite expiration date so that the customer has to use it immediately to download your product or get the purchased download within a specified time period (eg 72 hours). In this way, you can protect your product from:

a) Illegal sharing between buyers

b) Search engines find the files and index them.

c) People who find your thank you page with all the links to download your product

Unprotected thank you pages and download links equal loss

There are many ways that could drain your profits when you have your digital products unprotected. Although not all customers would want to “cheat” you, most people would be happy to get the product without paying. Some dangers you would avoid

1. Search Engine Transparency – It’s easy to see your products through the search engine and therefore make them available for people to download “legally”. They would never know that they are stealing and you would not know that you are losing money. Search engines crawl and index everything: eBook (pdf) files, software products, and even videos.

2. Download Sharing – Send a link and your customer can have it for free or sell it even if it is limited in time. To avoid that, you will also need to limit the number of downloads. Let’s say it could be valid for two hours and four download attempts. The client must be informed about the security measures well before sending the link so that they are prepared for it. If a time or download limit is due and the customer says so and requests files to download, you can easily ask that customer to provide proof of a purchase.

3. The Thank You Page Vulnerability: This is the easiest way to hack a digital product. You go through the unprotected thank you page, get the url and download it without any problem. You must install a download saver that checks if the payment was made before allowing access to the ebook or any other digital products you have.

How to protect your eBooks, software and other files? What are the alternatives?

Alternatively, you could take the following steps:

1. Constantly changing download site/domain.

2. Change the page where the download should be done from at regular intervals

3. Take advantage of encryption to prevent right-click copying and source code exposure

4. Search engines scan only two levels below your domain; try to keep your downloadable product three or four levels below, for example, [http://www.mydomain/directortyA/directoryB/sub-directoryC/mydownload] proceedings

5. Set your eBooks to pdf format as these offer you a password protected web location

There are more of these alternatives, however they are difficult to implement and not as effective as they seem. The best way to prevent this type of theft would be to install a very effective download protector. There are software programs that allow you to protect all of your downloadable products. However, the problem is that such software costs money, say $60 and it can take some time for everything to work properly, so there are better free ways to protect and sell your products online.