Protect Your Digital Products

Selling digital products online has become big business these days for Web Development companies. The big reason is you don't have to worry about: order taking, warehousing, and the headache of shipping and handling a physical product. The process is quite simple, visitors come to your website, choose their product, make the payment, and within minutes, they download and access their e-book or software. All of this is done 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Sounds simple right? Well there are a few steps that you can take to protect your digital products from individuals who would rather obtain it without paying for it. To be honest with you, digital download protection is not the first thing people think about when selling a digital product online. Therefore, by reading this article and following a few simple steps, you could help protect your digital products from virtual pirates.

1) Avoid using thankyou.html or download.html for your html download page. Give it an off beat name or just combine letters and numbers. Next include the: META name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" tag into your html code to help stop search engines from indexing your page. Also add an index.html page to your download folder and have it redirect to your home page.

2) Always place your product file in a zipped folder before uploading to your server. This can be accomplished one of two ways:
a) With a product called WinZip.
b) By right clicking on your digital product folder,then selecting the option "Send To", then, click on Compressed (zipped) Folder.
This is a necessary step, unless you want your PDF files indexed by the search engine making them available for the whole world to find.

3) Use an uncommon file name for your zipped file. Something like, X9F65S72, this serves two purposes. (This is also a good idea for the download folder on your sever.) First, it makes it harder for people to find the file. Second, it's harder to remember when incorporated in your download link.
Which link would be easier to remember: ex. www.(yoursite).com/download/thankyou.html or www.(yoursite).com/e7fjkd89/r9e73k-3ineke.html the choice is up to you.

4) The last thing you can do to protect your digital product is to change the file name every so often.
Following these simple steps can help you to protect your digital products. So taking a quick review of your digital delivery can help stop people from walking away with a freebie.