How to stop your digital product from exploding.

Have you ever bought a digital product and when you unzipped it, it exploded everywhere on your hard drive? Then you have to spend the next ten minutes rounding up the errant files and herding them in a neat and orderly fashion into a sub-directory, so that you can find them when you need them.

How do you think a customer feels if that happens with a product that they bought from you? Probably not that thrilled.

So how do you zip your products so that they unzip in a neat and tidy fashion?


Here’s a step-by-step process to help you get it done.

1. Create a new sub-directory on your hard drive:
   1. C:|MyProduct
2. If your product is very big and might require two zip files then create two further sub-directories below that (or as many as you need).
   1. C:|MyProduct|Part1
   2. C:|MyProduct|Part2
3. Copy all the relevant files into Part 1 and Part 2. Copy all graphics, blog links, follow me links, terms of use and information text files etc. into MyProduct.
4. Let’s start with Part1. Move the sub-directory Part2 by right clicking on it and dragging it out of the MyProducts directory and store it somewhere safe.
5. Right click on MyProduct and choose the option to zip. Rename the zip file to MyProduct_Part1.zip.
6. Then move the Part1 directory out of MyProduct, and then move the Part2 directory back into MyProduct.
7. Right click again on MyProduct and choose the option to zip. Now rename the zip file to MyProduct_Part2.zip.
8. The final step is to get rid of those silly thumbs.db files that always end up in your zip files. Double click each zip file so that it opens.
   1. Then double click Part1. When you see the thumbs.db, click on it and delete. Do this for all your zip files.
9. Now your product is ready for uploading to your store. When your customer unzips the files, the files will all be under MyProduct, MyProduct_Part1 and MyProduct_Part2. They will love you for this.

You can obviously use your own naming convention for your product but the process remains the same. it’s also a good idea to keep the zip files size below 40mb as there are lots of people who still use dial-up and files take a long time to download.

Have you ever had files explode on you? You can leave a comment on my blog.

Di