The great thing about selling your own digital products is that they cost very little to produce and have two more great benefits:

First, you don’t have to tie up any of your money in stocking a physical product and incur all the related costs of inventory management.

Second, the product can be delivered almost instantly, which is good for customer satisfaction.

It all sounds good so far but there is a serious downside to selling digital products.

If you sell any digital item that can be downloaded over the internet, such as e-books or software then digital theft should be a major concern for you. Digital theft is a widespread problem for anyone who sells digital information products over the Internet because there is a high probability that your product will be stolen if it is very popular.

It’s not surprising when you think about it because most digital information can be downloaded in seconds from just about anywhere on the planet. If the download page for your product has no protection then all it takes is for someone to be told where to find it and click on the unprotected download link.

Many information product vendors don’t even know that they are losing large amounts of money to digital thieves because they have no download protection system in place to stop them and nothing to track how many times their product has been downloaded and by whom.

Ways that your digital products can be stolen.

One of the first things a thief looks for when trying to get at your downloads is a directory with an obvious name such as ‘downloads’ or something similar.

You might think that simply choosing a hard-to-guess name for your downloads directory will stop people discovering it by trial-and-error methods which is probably true, but still nowhere near secure enough to stop more determined thieves.

One thing you must have in any download directory…

One thing you must have in any download directory is an index.html file. It can be even be an empty file but without it anyone can see a list of all the files in that directory and download the lot!

Can you imagine if someone legitimately bought your digital product and then gave out the download location for your product to all their friends? Once someone who is unscrupulous has the download location of your product then it can be spread around the Internet in seconds!

Then, for every one you sell, there might be many freeloaders reading it too, losing you tons of profit.

So hiding your product in a strangely named and therefore difficult to guess directory is NOT the solution!

And if you think that putting your downloads into a password-protected directory will prevent free access to them then think again. All it takes is for the password to be passed around in forums and other places and there goes your protection.

I suppose you could put your digital products inside a password protected secure membership area, accessible only by those who have paid you for your product first.

Sounds good right?

But, what’s to stop them giving out their login details for anyone else to use?

Answer: NOTHING!

Yet another irritating scenario is when someone deliberately buys your product but with the sole intention of getting a quick refund under your money-back guarantee.

They then have your product for nothing!

There is very little you can do to stop that happening but, thankfully, most buyers are honest so you have to factor this kind of loss into the equation. In fact, having a money-back guarantee will reassure prospective buyers and encourage more sales so it should balance out in the end.

The bottom line is, to protect your digital products from theft, you simply must have a secure download system on your website that allows legitimate purchasers access to your products but nobody else.

Because of the problem of digital theft there are some excellent software scripts that can be quickly installed on your website to protect your downloads. They are not expensive and will pay for themselves very quickly by the money they save you that is now being lost to digital thieves.

From then on you will be saving all the money which you would still be losing to digital thieves, so the initial cost of the software is a price well worth paying.

As soon as you install one of these download protection scripts on your website you can stop worrying about your product downloads being stolen.

No one will get free access to your products anymore!

Conclusion:

I hope that you have found this information helpful. If you are selling unprotected digital products from your website then there is every chance that you have had some of them stolen. You have probably been ripped off and lost large amounts of money without even realizing it.

Installing a download protection system is highly effective and affordable, and will pay for itself in no time at all.

So don’t let the thieves rip you off any more by installing a secure download system that will stop them in their tracks at source.

Every day that you put it off is costing you money.