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Download Security Tips For Newbies

If you’ve been in the Internet Marketing business a while then you may recognize a lot of these tricks but this is aimed at people who are new or not very technically minded.

If you sell digital products online you are always in danger of people hacking into your web pages or download folders etc, it’s just the way things are.

Actually, statistics show that for every digital product that gets sold online 4 get stolen, and you wonder why you’re not making as many sales as you should.

The best solution is obviously to invest in some sort of download protection system,there are a number of different sytems and scripts etc with a wide range of prices to suit your needs and I will provide a couple of links at the end of this article.

However there are a number of things you can do yourself that don’t cost anything except for a few moments of your time to make things more difficult for digital thieves.

These are some tricks that I have personally used and maybe you can try them yourself.

OK lets first talk about your downloads folder and page.

I never name my downloads folder downloads because this makes it easy for a digital thief to find.

For example if the domain where your product is set up is called

www.yoursite.com/

Then a digital thief would just have to enter this in his/her browser address bar

www.yoursite.com/downloads/

Bingo! he/she has found your downloads folder (Scary Eh?)

Now lets say that you are selling a product that is called Grilled-Plankton-Recipes and you have zipped it up and actually name the file Grilled-Plankton-Recipes

Then the digital thief would only have to enter

www.yoursite.com/downloads/Grilled-Plankton-Recipes.zip

There goes your hard earned product

What can you do to help this situation?

First of all instead of naming your downloads folder downloads give it a coded name that you can still recognize but is hard to guess,

Bearing in mind that a digital thief may be using some clever software to find your file and folder names, the hardest ones to find are names that are made up of letters and numbers as applies also to passwords.

Do the same for your actual files.

Better still, put your downloads on a different domain.

Also put a blank htm or html document in your downloads and images folders and name it index,

If you don’t have a html editor you can make one in a simple text editor such as Windows Notepad by opening a new document then copy and paste this:

<html>

<head>

</head>

<body>

</body>

</html>

then save it under file type all files and name it index.html or index.htm

This way if anyone finds your folder, because browsers always look for an index file first they will be presented with a blank web page

You could also put a redirect page here or a warning message or even a special offer although I can’t really imagine a digital thief wanting to purchase your special offer.

Search Engines can also be willingly helpful to a digital thief if you don’t take precautions.

You need to make sure that your downloads page doesn’t get indexed in the search engines after all you don’t want your download page on the first page of google pulling in 50.000 visitors a day now do you?

You can help this by simply pasting this snippet of code directly under the <head> tag of your download page and any other page you don’t want indexing

Here are a couple of links for download protection software and scripts.

This is a really simple but effective tool

Download Guardian

This is what I personally use but it’s a complete Marketing Automation System at a small monthly rate but I can highly recommend it, go to the page and click on the Demo link at the top of the page for a complete tour then try it for a month free to see what you think. I know you won’t cancel once you’ve tried it.

TotalMarketer

I hope these tips although easy to carry out will help you and I’ll be back with more in following articles.
Ian Wilson