When the time comes for you to take that step and go from being an affiliate to offering a product through affiliates, using a site such as Clickbank or PayDotCom, one challenge is keeping people who haven’t bought your product from downloading it. It can be a pain to keep your download URL secure from those who would just share it.

This is where you may want to consider a Secure Delivery Digital Download Manager.

There are a variety of options for this. You can install something on your own server, but that’s not for everyone. You can also have another company handle the security for you. This generally costs a bit more overall, with a monthly price, but is great for peace of mind.

Any program you choose should allow you to have immediate downloads. These days, I like to think that that is just obvious. No one wants to buy a downloadable product, then wait for the site owner to email them a link. It just doesn’t work that well. Having it available immediately should not be an issue.

The advantage to something like this is that the buyer’s link expires after a set time, so that they cannot share it with just anyone. A good program will also allow for you to give free downloads when you want, so that you can get people to review your product. You also want to understand if there are any limitations on the number of product you sell, the bandwidth you use, number of transactions and so forth. You don’t want to be incurring extra costs if you aren’t planning for them.

One of these days I’ll be giving selling my own products - just have to make the time to finish them off. And I’ll be looking seriously at the available solutions so that I can make the right choice for myself.