Protect Your Digital Products from Online Thieves
Are you selling digital products? Are your digital download pages safe? If no, then you better read on. If yes, well you better think again! No download page in the World Wide Web is 100% safe from stealing.
There are a lot of people who look for loopholes and download pages to steal online. Some of them just can’t afford the product, and some even share these stolen digital downloads to others for free.
I have known of several internet marketers, and some are really well known, that don’t take the time to protect their product’s download pages. If the BIG players can be stolen from, can it happen to you? You bet!
The bad news is you can’t stop these thieves from stealing from you. The good news? You can do a lot to protect your download pages and make it hard for these online thieves to steal from you.
Protecting Your Digital Product’s Download Pages
1. Rework Your Download Page Templates
If you bought a product that comes with a reseller website for you to use, don’t just upload the entire reseller website folder without making necessary changes. If you already have a live download page online, then you might as well apply these changes:
- Don’t just use the ordinary “Thank you for your purchase! Your card has been charged by….blah blah blah…”. This line has been overused and is a potential loophole to your download page. Rewrite and make it unique!
- You should also avoid putting clickable links inside your download pages. If you really have to put a link, just type it and don’t make it clickable. If you have any clickable links on your download pages, there is a chance that this can be followed by Google and can be found through online searches.
2. Using the Right CHMOD Settings.
Some of these online thieves would spend time searching your website for loopholes on your file folders. Your website’s file folders are the same as the folders on your computer. This is where you upload your website’s content.
If you like to protect a particular folder from these online thieves, make use of the correct CHMOD settings. If you are using FileZilla as your FTP application, this is termed as File Permissions. To some this is called File Attributes.
If you create a new file folder on your hosting account, these folders are automatically given a CHMOD status of 755. This is not the correct setting for valuable files; most especially your digital product’s download pages.
You should change this to 751 to keep the files inside hidden to the public. This can eliminate a dozen thieves from stealing your digital products.
The 751 setting won’t work on every file folders on your site. Most especially to those containing files that run scripts that need a different CHMOD setting to work. You can solve this by having a file folder that is dedicated only to your digital product’s pages, and downloads.
3. Don’t Let Google Help Steal Your Digital Products!
You can’t blame Google for helping these online thieves. It’s only a system after all. Their spiders crawl every nooks and sides of the World Wide Web, even your digital products download page can be indexed.
Google won’t know if a particular page is your download page or any other page on your site. To Google, these are all content that they can index. So what can you do? You can add the line of code below to all the pages that you don’t want Google to display on their search list.
<meta name=”robots” content=”no index, no follow”>
Put this code right below the <head> tag or above the </head> tag. This should tell Google’s spiders to not index your download pages.
4. Always Put an Index File (index.html or index.htm) On Each of Your Folders.
Always remember to put an index file, either index.html or index.htm, on each of your web folders. This is the easiest loophole to find for those online thieves.
To know why, try creating a folder on your website and another folder inside it called “download”. Type the address of the folder you just created (not the folder in it) on your browser. See what I mean? They can check the contents of your folders that have no index.htm or index.html without you knowing it. Not unless you check your web statistics regularly that is. And I know most of you don’t!
Combine all of these steps and you’ll tighten your digital download pages even more. There are several online digital sellers that don’t take the time to do this. Every day, they let more and more online thieves to steal and get their products for free.
Don’t let this happen to your digital product’s download pages. Protect your online profits and make more money online doing these simple steps.
