I grew up in Texas.  I'm still here.

In Texas, if you steal a horse, we hang you. In Texas, people are allowed to carry guns to protect themselves and their personal property. As a child growing up in Texas, I was raised to understand that stealing is wrong. Well, one thing is for sure — not everyone is from Texas.

The other day, I woke up to this anonymous email message about my product, Niche Adsense Themes for WordPress:

To: mark
Subj: Your Download Page is Unprotected

http://www.nicheadsensethemes.com/thankyou2008-1.html
It is floating in a black hat forum.
Remove it.

Anonymous

And sure enough, download activity showed this to be true.  People were stealing my stuff. (And by the way, thanks very much to the anonymous emailer, whomever you are).

Protecting Your Electronic Downloads

Now, I had already followed all the recommended methods for keeping my downloadable product safe:

• Use a thank you page that is hard to guess
• Use file names that are hard to guess
• Use robots.txt to block searching
• Use nofollow tags
• etc.

The problem is, that just does not protect you against really determined hackers.  There are lots of ways that product security can be compromised.  Some search engines (one in particular) are said to ignore nofollow tags and robots.txt.  This can result in your thank you page getting indexed.  Another problem can be that you customers might accidentally (or on purpose) share your download link with others.

Using Software To Protect Software

My solution was to go out and purchase a copy of DL Guard.   DL Guard (or DLG as it is often referred to) was recommended to be by some other top internet marketers that are happy customers.  At $127, it is not cheap.  However, it is feature-packed and the customer service is highly regarded according to people I spoke with.

DL Guard is really a lot more than just a download page protector (which is all I really needed at the moment).  Cool features of DL Guard include:

• Single or multi-product sales
• Expiring download links
• Limited download attempts
• Integration with many major payment processors (including ClickBank)
• Mailing list automation
• Membership site features
• Many others….I have only scratched the surface so far on this software

How My Product Is Protected

Install of this software was super easy.  It took me 10 minutes to install the software on my server and convert my existing sales page to enable protection.  So, now when you purchase Niche Adsense Themes for WordPress, you get a unique download link just for you.  When you download the product, your IP address is logged.  You have a limited time to download the product before the link expires, and you have a limited number of times you can download it.  The actual URL of the download is never revealed to the user.

Bottom Line:  I'm Impressed

I have not even started looking at the rest of the features — but the bottom line is that I am really impressed with DL Guard.  This looks like an excellent tool for my Internet Marketing Toolkit — one that I will use over and over in my business.  So, while I was initially put off by the “high” price of $127, I am impressed with the product.  I plan to keep DL Guard and use it to protect my current and future digital products.  If you are worried about digital product theft, I recommend that you check DL Guard out (their product website is excellent).