Tired of Having Your Stuff Stolen? Read This:

8 replies
I have read countless threads of authors complaining about having their work stolen and then distributed across the internet which, in their minds, resulted in the loss of sales. As an author/publisher, I can totally understand.

I have always said that if you want to really protect yourself against online theft, you have to think in terms of how a thief thinks. I will get into this in a second but first.....

Understand that most of the people who are downloading your stuff from search engines and torrents and rapidshare are highly unlikely to buy your stuff in the first place. So, really, looking at it like a lost sale is really not a fair assessment of it and I believe is primarily the reason why the big names don't bother trying to hide their stuff from theives (that, or they are just that stupid....some of their stuff is so easy to find, you can just google the name of the product with a '.pdf' beside it)...

Now for one of the easiest ways to circumvent theives....

Most of the theives grab your stuff freely from the search engines. How do they do that? Well, they will type in the name of your product AND add what is a canned response that most marketers use....(in the case of paypal and clickbank this canned response or a variation is required)

"thanks for purchasing...your credit card will have a charge that says "fill-in-the-blank"....or something to that effect. It is as easy as that. Now google honors the no follow rule but some other search engines don't. What results is that your entire site including the thank you page gets indexed.

So, how do you prevent this? Simple. Rather than building a "thanks for purchasing in HTML (which gets indexed), instead turn it into a photo (and call it something obscure).

While this won't take your thank you page out of the search engines that don't comply with 'no follow', it will make it a bit more difficult to discover.

Then again, if they aren't honoring the 'no follow' rule, couldn't someone just do a "site:..." search and find your thank you page? Sure, they can. So, why not put your thank you page on a completely different domain?

Just some thoughts since I see so many people crying about having their stuff stolen....
#affiliate marketing #affiliate program #clickbank #secure download #stolen products #thief
  • Profile picture of the author Steve Taylor
    Some good points Simon.

    Another no no canned statement is..Thank You for your investment...
    I have seen that indexed too often.

    -Steve
    Signature

    Ask...Because you never stop learning.

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  • Profile picture of the author ptone
    How does this solve the torrent/rapidshare issue?

    When someone does buy and download your product, this method does not prevent that customer from requesting a refund, then uploading your product to torrents/rapidshare and then telling all their buddies where to download.
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    • Profile picture of the author Simon_Sezs
      Originally Posted by ptone View Post

      How does this solve the torrent/rapidshare issue?

      When someone does buy and download your product, this method does not prevent that customer from requesting a refund, then uploading your product to torrents/rapidshare and then telling all their buddies where to download.
      There is no way to prevent that, although you can do a couple things to **confuse** things.

      1. build a 'preview' or salesletter with the name of the product on it and send it out to the torrents. Do it a couple dozen times.
      2. With rapidshare, you can monitor this and get it dropped pretty quickly.
      Come on, man....if it is that important to you...start thinking outside the box...
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    • Profile picture of the author Steve Taylor
      Originally Posted by ptone View Post

      How does this solve the torrent/rapidshare issue?

      When someone does buy and download your product, this method does not prevent that customer from requesting a refund, then uploading your product to torrents/rapidshare and then telling all their buddies where to download.
      It doesn't.
      It's for the low lifes that search for canned terms that just want a free copy of your product.

      -Steve
      Signature

      Ask...Because you never stop learning.

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      • Profile picture of the author Mr.P
        Banned
        [DELETED]
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        • Profile picture of the author Lou Diamond
          Hello,
          the majority of the people that steal products never put them to use.
          If they were putting any to use they would be making money and
          would not mind paying to further thier education.
          Signature

          Something new soon.

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        • Profile picture of the author Richard Tunnah
          Originally Posted by Mr.P View Post

          There is.

          There was an ebook a while back that demonstrated someones system of protection it the ip of the user that bought the product matches with an ip. then a unique key is generated to match that ip...so only that pc can use it.

          I think allot of people tried to hack it no success.
          It's Derek Gehl and 'his' Internet Marketing Centre company that have an exe program for ebooks that locks to IP addresses and can be set to allow so many uses. You can also revoke users as well. I saw it demonstrated by Derek at a seminar. Looks great but I worry an exe file puts people off.

          Rich
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  • Profile picture of the author Janet Sawyer
    Originally Posted by Simon_Sezs View Post

    I have read countless threads of authors complaining about having their work stolen and then distributed across the internet which, in their minds, resulted in the loss of sales. As an author/publisher, I can totally understand.

    I have always said that if you want to really protect yourself against online theft, you have to think in terms of how a thief thinks. I will get into this in a second but first.....

    Understand that most of the people who are downloading your stuff from search engines and torrents and rapidshare are highly unlikely to buy your stuff in the first place. So, really, looking at it like a lost sale is really not a fair assessment of it and I believe is primarily the reason why the big names don't bother trying to hide their stuff from theives (that, or they are just that stupid....some of their stuff is so easy to find, you can just google the name of the product with a '.pdf' beside it)...

    Now for one of the easiest ways to circumvent theives....

    Most of the theives grab your stuff freely from the search engines. How do they do that? Well, they will type in the name of your product AND add what is a canned response that most marketers use....(in the case of paypal and clickbank this canned response or a variation is required)

    "thanks for purchasing...your credit card will have a charge that says "fill-in-the-blank"....or something to that effect. It is as easy as that. Now google honors the no follow rule but some other search engines don't. What results is that your entire site including the thank you page gets indexed.

    So, how do you prevent this? Simple. Rather than building a "thanks for purchasing in HTML (which gets indexed), instead turn it into a photo (and call it something obscure).

    While this won't take your thank you page out of the search engines that don't comply with 'no follow', it will make it a bit more difficult to discover.

    Then again, if they aren't honoring the 'no follow' rule, couldn't someone just do a "site:..." search and find your thank you page? Sure, they can. So, why not put your thank you page on a completely different domain?

    Just some thoughts since I see so many people crying about having their stuff stolen....
    Simon,

    I hope people take the time to read and understand your post. You made some good and really valid points. Thank You.
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