Most digital goods sellers don’t have download protection to protect themselves against free downloads. You probably think it won’t happen to you, or if it happened you can live with that.

Fellow Internet Marketers, maybe you underestimate this illegal action. It will happen to you if it hasn’t already. It won’t be one or two either, it will be a flood of illegal downloads from your site. Let’s look at this scenario: Somebody purchased your product and was directed to the download page after payment processed. Then this person decided to bookmark the download page using the social bookmarking sites such as delicious or others. The default setting for some social bookmarking sites is public and because most people don’t bother to change the setting your download page link will be visible to other people from anywhere in the world, and if they like what this person has bookmarked they can add it to their bookmarks too. If your product is so darn good a lot of people will happily add the download link to their bookmarks. Things can go even worse if the search engines start detecting your download link being shared within the social bookmarking sites. You DON’T want your download page get indexed by the search engines.

Perhaps the scenario above is too extreme and I haven’t found a download page link sitting on the first page of Google yet (or maybe I wasn’t ‘lucky’ enough?) but link sharers do exist and have always been a problem. Some people think it’s okay to post the link to your download page in a forum somewhere, and while most forum owners are honest and will take the post down, sometimes, with a busy forum, it may go unnoticed.

How to Prevent This From Happening?

It is incredibly important that you have the right protection for your product. While you can’t prevent all fraud, having download protection can certainly help.

There are some different options out there for you. One of the outdated options is to simply password-protected the download directory on your server. To do this you have to go into your web host’s Cpanel and select a directory to protect and then give your customers the username and password to access the product. This method is obviously not the most professional way to go but if you can’t afford to purchase download protection this is considered to be an alternative solution.

E-junkie

If you can afford to purchase download protection for your money site you may want to try E-junkie. It offers you a free one week trial and after that you can pay as little as $5 per month.

E-junkie automates and secures the digital delivery of files and codes and has no transaction limit, no bandwidth limit, no setup fee and no transaction fee.

Other E-junkie features:

Customize your checkout page, thank you page and thank you e-mail sent to the buyer.

Limit the number of downloads and validity of secure product download links.

Accept Multiple currency and language support.

Supports Google adwords tracking, Yahoo overture, MSN Adcenter, AdBrite and other tracking programs.

Send out a promotional copies of your products using free download link feature.

Easily re-activate and re-send the download links if required.

View and download your transactions log anytime.

How It Works

Once you register, you can add products from the admin panel. For each product you will get BUY NOW and ADD TO CART / CHECKOUT buttons. All you need to do is to paste either of these button codes in your website. This is the only step you are involved in. Rest of the process is automatic.

Buyer purchases your product using E-Junkie’s buttons and pays you directly in your PayPal, Google Checkout, 2CheckOut, Authorize.Net or ClickBank account using their credit card, PayPal or Google Checkout account. Your payment processor notifies E-junkie’s server.

E-junkie’s server verifies the notification and screens for fraud. Buyer will then be redirected to the download page instantly if the product is digital product. Additionally, an e-mail is sent to the buyer with the download link and your custom message.

SmartDD – Automated Digital Delivery System

SmartDD gives you a fully functioning download protection for the first 5 digital products you sell and you can install it on as many domains as you like, this is not a per-domain licence fee. If you have more than 5 products to protect then you can upgrade the license for a one-time fee of $97. Note that everybody join in as FREE Member initially meaning there is no fee to pay. It is ideal for people like me who just start selling digital products online and want to keep the expenses as low as possible before seeing the money flowing in.

This is how SmartDD automated digital delivery works, in a nutshell.

1. You receive a payment from a customer via PayPal (and now ClickBank too).
2. PayPal sends the details to SmartDD.
3. SmartDD sends an email to your customer with a UNIQUE link to the download page which has their name, email address, and home or business address on it.
4. Your customer goes to the download page and downloads their purchase by clicking on another UNIQUE link.
5. After they’ve downloaded, the link expires.
6. 24 hours after the purchase, it will also send out a personalised follow-up email to your customer which can be an upsell, cross-sell or any message you wish, even an additional unadvertised bonus just to keep their interest.

Cool?

- Rudi

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