Archive for May, 2007

Review: Download Warrior - How to protect your digital download pages.

Monday, May 7th, 2007

Unfortunately, there are many people out there on the Internet who want to rip you off. They want to take your money, they want to get a hold of your digital products without paying for them.

Not a day goes by when I see forum posts that say “my ebook is being stolen” or “I’ve been hacked”.

Because of these wrotten people who are trying get hold of the products that you have invested both time and money in, you need to protect your products.

One of the best ways to do this is to secure your download pages with expiring links… that is a link that after a preset period of time, will no longer work.

Download Warrior is an extremely easy to use, inexpensive, download page protection software that creates expiring links to that page.

To use Download Warrior you initially create your download page, the web page that your buyers will be directed to after thier payment has been processed.

Once your page has been created, save it to a folder on your hard drive.

You then run Download Warrior which has a simple dialog box like interface.

In the dialog first click on the Select File button. This brings up a standard file navigation folder where you can navigate to the folder that you saved your download page to. Once at the folder, select the file you created and then the Open button.

Back in Download Warrior, all you need do is select the number of hours that the link will be valid for and then click on the Update button.

When you click on the Update button, the software will create three new .php files and rename the original download page file. It is the three new files that you need to upload to your website download folder.

Sidenote:, it is always a good idea to name your website download folder with a name that is difficult if not impossible to guess at. Use a mixture of numbers and letters, making it totally random with no whole words in it.

Once you have uploaded your files, navigate to your folder (using your browser) and include index.php (http://www.mysite.com/downloadfolder/index.php). You will be asked to enter your password. This password is the one that you gave Download Warrior when you registered the product, and is shown in the bottom left of the dialog.

You will be taken a page that will show the link that you need to copy and paste into your payment processor that will redirect your buyer to the download page after payment has been made. This link is automatically changed for each buyer and the best thing about it is that the link that the buyer is given is only useable for the amount of time that you set when you create the files (the default is 2 hours). This means that only genuine buyers get to your download pages, and will prevent you from being riped off.

Sidenote: No software is 100% hacker safe, but this software will prevent “casual” theives from taking your products.

Download Warrior is a great tool for protecting your digital download pages and at the price ($27) can save you a small fortune in lost sales.

Take a look: Download Warrior