So you are a business owner now and are selling top-of-the-line digital information products direct from your very own website. Your customers are flowing in, but your bandwidth is insufficient for the volume of customers you are receiving! your host stops all access to your site as you have reached your bandwidth limit and you must pay for more. Sound familiar? This is my story. Making money is the hard part of running an online business
. Online criminals don't know that part yet, but what they do know is how to get hold of your products that you paid for for nothing! How? By stealing them from right under your nose, direct from your server.
Online surveys conducted show that around 40% of digital products are stolen or bootleg copies. Pirates and theives know the detailed ways in which to get to that copy of your ebook and make it work for them, sometimes outselling you completely, even if you are the sole resale rights holder! So,
how can you stop this from happening to you?
Protect your products with digital security.
Disguise your download links.
Set your links to expire or only activate them with your customers' details.
Place them in a secure member area so if they are found, they cannot be accessed.
Now all of these have various strengths and weaknesses, and some I just refuse to use as I feel they downgrade your site’s look and appeal. Let's
take disguising your download links – this is the single best way of stopping theft of your products direct from your website. There are tonnes of scripts around online that can handle this task, many of them very well, but what happens after the sale when the report is passed around or the customer asks for a refund?
Set your links to expire or to your customers' email addresses, or place them into a secure members area. These again do well at hiding the products, but do nothing about securing them after the sale has gone through.
So the only real option is to offer some sort of digital protection for the products. There are various systems around the internet that offer this service for a monthly subscription, but are you sure that your products warrant it?
I have seen people paying $30 a month to protect a $4 ebook from being stolen or used elsewhere. That, to me, is not practical.
But if you hold an inventory of hundreds of good-quality ebooks and software that you are not offering with resale rights, then maybe digital protection is what you need.
The digital locking systems that I have seen get you signed up as a paying member to use their software. Once signed up, you can download the locking software and lock a file at a time. You place the details of the file on the site and then direct customers to the link that the site creates for you. Once your customer pays, they will see the link to the locking software site and click it.
The customer is taken to a page that requests their details in exchange for their personal unlocking code, and then they are passed to the download or thankyou page on your server. Once downloaded, the file is opened and immediately a request appears from the locked file for a password. If the password is correct, the file talks to the locking site and verifies it, then unlocks the file. If the password is incorrect, the user is refused access.
Now comes the sweet part of this software. If you give a customer a refund, then you can actually remotely lock their product again or delete their licence all together. The software I have seen works on an IP tracking basis, which means that all IP addresses that access the product are logged in the locking sites database for the seller to see and act on.
Assume the seller sells an item to "Joe," who then sends the file to "Pete," who then sends it to "Fred," "Paul," and "William."All of their IP addresses are logged and the seller can see that the file has been accessed x number of times by 5 separate IP addresses and closes the code down for "Joe", who gets an automated email explaining that his code is now invalid and that to reactivate it he must contact the seller for advice. Ahhhh, the theif now has to contact you and ask why he is in trouble.
These systems are very powerful and put the seller back in charge of their products instead of the thieves.
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