Download theft and how to prevent it. by Steven Hancock

If you sell digital products online, there's a good chance that your products are being stolen. Here's how it works and how you can protect yourself.

A customer buys your product. After downloading their purchase, they visit a forum and post your download link for other members to use. By the time you realize what's going on, hundreds or even thousands of people have aready downloaded your product for free. Since a good number of these people would have probably bought your product, you end up losing a lot of money.

If you use PayPal, it can be even worse. If you don't encrypt your payment links, it's easy for someone to view your source and find your download page. They could also change the price and end up paying you $.01 for a $90 product.

Fortunately, there is a solution. Sam Stephens has written a powerful, secure script called DLGuard. This script is an easy and effective way to prevent link sharing, but it does much more than that. DLGuard completely integrates with ClickBank, PayPal, 2Checkout, AlertPay, PayDotCom, EBay, EA Script and many other third-party ecommerce scripts. DLGuard supports single item sales, multiple item sales and even membership subscriptions. It even helps you to protect and track products you're giving away for free and works with your autoresponder to help build a responsive list of customers. You can download DLGuard at http://urlfreeze.com/stevenh77/dlguard/

DLGuard prevents link sharing by giving each customer a secure download page. You can set this page to expire after a certain amount of time and you can limit the number of times a customer can download your product from this page. It also prevents search engines from indexng your download page, or worse, your actual product. Many search engines can read PDF files and convert them to HTML, so customers could actually be stealing and reading your product directly from Google.

While you can't prevent theft entirely, DLGuard does provide a lot of protection and prevents casual sharing of download links, which accounts for the majority of download theft. Get it now at http://urlfreeze.com/stevenh77/dlguard/