This is a question that has been troubling marketers for a long time now, especially since product theft is so prevalent these days. So what do you do? Do you make it so that your product is easy to access by your customers, thus making it easier to steal, or do you make it secure, thus making it more difficult for your customers to use it? If you think there is an easy answer to this question, you might want to keep reading. I don’t claim to have the answers. I’m just going to present both sides of the equation and let the reader decide.

Most Internet marketing products are sold in the form of PDF files. The reason for this is that they are cheap and easy to make. Using something like Open Office, you can make these files at no cost whatsoever. And while you do have the capability of password protecting the PDF, that still won’t stop the person who bought it from selling or even giving away your PDF and give away the password with it. So in a sense, password protection is pretty much worthless. And in this case, you’ve inconvenienced your buyer by making him type in a password each time he opens your PDF and haven’t really secured it at all. This is the worst of both worlds. So it is best to leave your PDFs unprotected. This makes the customer happy, but leaves you open to a ton of product theft.

On the other side of the coin you have products that go through some very elaborate copy protection. Many ebooks are created as EXE files and can only be opened on the computer where they are installed. The problem with this methods is that if the buyer has a computer crash, or wants to put the file on more than one computer, he can’t. The download usually only allows one installation. This does not make for a happy customer, though your creation will be pretty well protected.

You can probably see the advantage of securing your product, but maybe you can’t see the advantage of inconveniencing your customer. Well, here it is. If you make it difficult for your customer to use your product, there is a good chance that he will either return it or, at the very least, never purchase another product from you. You may lose a lot of repeat business selling heavily secured products.

As you can see, there is no easy solution to this problem. Ultimately, it is the product creator’s choice. I just wanted to present both sides so that you can make that choice knowing the consequences of each one.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
Tired of getting your stuff stolen? Check out my review of the best digital protection software ever made at http://dlguardprotection.blogspot.com/2008/09/protecting-your-business-download.html and stop thieves dead in their tracks TODAY!

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