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2

Download Protection: Fact & Fiction

FACT: Anything that you put out on the web, can be downloaded – one way or the other.

FACT: People who are out to steal stuff, will steal it no matter what.

FACT: By taking security too far, you will only annoy and irritate 99% of your members who have absolutely no intention of ripping you off or stealing your content in any way.

DAP provides built-in security for files and video and just about any other type of file extension – like .pdf, .zip, .doc, etc. DAP will make sure that even if the URL to the actual file gets passed around, the person trying to access the file will have to log in first before they can access the content. So your content is safe from un-authorized users, with DAP protecting it.

However, what about a valid, paying member? When they get access to a protected PDF or .zip or even a video, can DAP prevent them from downloading the file to their desktop? If a paying member who has legitimate access to a PDF file, can download the PDF to their desktop, can they not then turn around and upload it to their own web site, or send it as an attachment via email to their friends? Is there any way to make files not downloadable at all?

Sure they can. But trying to build a Fort Knox around your content, is not really the best thing for your members.

Taking Security Too Far

Like we mentioned above, anything that’s out there on the web, can be duplicated, copied, downloaded – in one way or the other. Nothing is 100% secure.

  • You could use “Streaming Only” technology to make sure even legitimate, paying members cannot download videos from your member’s area. But guess what? There are screen-capture tools – even free ones – that can be used to rip your video, and convert it into a file that can then be passed around on pirate sites. So preventing download of videos would only result in upsetting your legitimate members, because people like to watch videos even when they’re away from their computer – like on their ipad when sitting on a bed or a couch. Making everything “streaming only” means that they must be online and logged in to your member’s area every single time to watch your videos. Not a good thing for your members. You want to upset 99% of your members just to prevent that 1% who may (or may not) steal your content?
  • PDF’s can’t really be prevented from being downloaded. Once the PDF reader opens a PDF file, even if it’s by clicking on a link on your web site, it means it’s already downloaded on to the computer in some kind of a “temp” folder. So it has already left your web site and landed on the user’s computer. Nothing much you can do from there. Sure, you could make your PDF’s password protected, but they can pass on the password too to others. You could make your PDF files so that they cannot be copy/pasted, or cannot be printed. But guess what? There are tools out there that will break any kind of encryption or restriction you put on your PDF files, within seconds. And those who want to actually steal your content, also know what those tools are and how to use them.

So can your content be “too secure”? Absolutely. You can make it too hard for 99% of your legitimate members, just to prevent the 1% from stealing it (but they’re going to find a way to steal anyway). What’s the point, really? Those who want to steal, know how to pick your lock. So why make it harder for your real members?

Can people pass on their username/password to their friends to log in to your member’s area? Sure. But DAP will lock their account from further access, if it detects an account getting logins from more than, say “5” (or whatever you set as admin) IP addresses.

Can people download your videos from your site after getting legit access to it, using screen-capture tools, then re-upload to a torrent or black-hate site? Sure, they can.

Can people break your “password-lock”, “print-lock” or any other kind of restriction you place on your PDF files, within seconds? Sure, they can.

No, your content can never be 100% secure. Any one who tells you so, is either lying, or doesn’t have a clue.

Your only goal should be to make it hard for the “casual” abusers, that’s all. Not to make it so hard that even your legitimate members have to jump through hoops to get to it.

The best membership sites we have seen, provide access to their content in multiple formats.

Do you publish video content? Then right below the video, also give them a link to “download” the video and “watch it at their leisure”, publish an “Audio Version” in .mp3 format, publish a “PDF Transcript” of everything said in the video, so they can even “read” the content from your video.

Is your content mostly text? Then offer a PDF version of your blog post or page, so they can download it, print it, and read it offline. Or make a “Read Aloud” version of your blog post and offer it as a .mp3 file, so they can “listen” to your content while at the gym, or while going for a walk, or while driving in their car.

Bottom-line: Don’t worry about the 1% who will never pay you, probably will steal your content, and pass it on to others one way or the other. Just focus on creating great value for the 99% of your paying members who pay you, support you, promote you, and keep coming back month after month after month. And that’s the best use of your time and resources, and that’s the only way to build a successful membership site.

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Gmail Integration With DAP

WARNING: Gmail integration may not work for everyone. Many factors – including, but not limited to, your physical location, the location associated with your Gmail account, location of server, IP address, etc – appear to play a role in whether or not this will work for you with your Gmail account. So please note, that if it doesn’t work for you, then there isn’t anything the DAP team can do to overcome or “fix” that. It’s Google, after all. We don’t know what rules and monitoring they have in place for this. So, if Gmail integration doesn’t work for you, then you may want to consider Amazon SES integration, which has a 100% success rate with DAP users at this time.

To increase deliverability of your autoresponder, broadcast and instant emails (like “Welcome” email), you can make DAP completely by-pass your web host’s email server, and send emails out through third-party email servers, like Gmail or Amazon SES. This article is about setting up DAP to send out emails through Gmail’s email servers.

Sending Email Through Google’s Gmail Servers

Before you start sending out mass emails through Google’s Gmail Servers, please note this…

Sending out emails through Gmail instead of your web host, will surely boost your deliverability, no doubt. But remember that Gmail is NOT meant to use for mass emails. It is not really meant to be used as a list service. Plus they have a very strict restriction of 500 emails per 24-hour period.

You exceed that quota even by one, and they probably will temporarily disable your Gmail account for about 24 hours. Sending a large number of un-deliverable emails (resulting in bounces) could also get your entire Gmail account permanently suspended. And if you lose your Google username, it may (no confirmation available) affect your other Google accounts too – like AdWords or AdSense.

Anyway, DAP has a round-robin emailing system – so you could set up and use multiple Gmail accounts – each with its own 500 email limit per day – and combine them to send out a larger broadcast. However, remember – we’re talking about Google here – which means they can suspend/cancel/delete your account for any reason at all, even more so when you’re going against their TOS.

So use Gmail with caution, and only for smaller lists. If you want a larger sending email limit, check out the DAP integration with Amazon SES which allows you to send out tens of thousands of emails a day.

  1. Log in to your DAP Admin Panel, and go to DAP Admin > Email > SMTP.
  2. On this screen, use the section Add a New SMTP Serverto create a new SMTP row as follows:Description: Gmail (can be anything really)
    Server: tls://smtp.gmail.com (must be exactly that)
    Port: 465 (must be exactly that)
    SSL: N (must be exactly that)
    User Id: youremail@gmail.com (your gmail email id)
    Password: yourpassword (your gmail password)
    Email Sending Limit Per Hour: 500 (don’t go more – less is ok)
  3. Click on the Add button to create and save the new Gmail SMTP server setting.
  4. Once it is saved, now you will see 2 rows on the screen: One for “Localhost”, and the other is the new “Gmail”.
  5. Towards the end of each row, you’ll see a setting called “Activated?”. Set it to “N” for Localhost and “Y” for Gmail.
  6. That will now make all of your outgoing emails (listed below) go out only through Gmail, totally bypassing your web host’s email server. Which means, your email deliverability will go up substantially.
  7. List of outgoing emails for which your Gmail account will be used, include:
    – Real-time Welcome Emails
    – Third-party Notification Emails (to Admin, other third-parties, Aweber, etc)
    – All notification and transactional emails to DAP Admin – like payment receipt, new user signup, error notifications, user unsubscription notifications, etc
    – All autoresponder and broadcast emails
    – etc…

 

1

Leveraging Multiple Affiliate Networks

DAP is so powerful and flexible, that you can sell access to your membership through different payment processors, all at the same time.

And we often get asked how to leverage different affiliate networks like ClickBank and JVZoo and Warrior Plus at the same time while making sure no affiliate commissions are lost, and every affiliate gets credited their commissions for sending potential buyers to your site.

The Big Picture

1) If buyer arrives ONLY through DAP affiliate link, and ends up purchasing through ANY payment processor, then DAP affiliate will get credit.

2) If buyer arrives ONLY through CB affiliate link, and ends up purchasing through CB payment processor, but the buyer has a different DAP affiliate’s cookie from a link he clicked on at some point before (but did not purchase at that time, say), then both CB affiliate and DAP affiliate will get credit (double commissions on same purchase, but to two different affiliates).

If there’s no DAP cookie on his computer, then only CB affiliate will get the commission.

If the DAP affiliate “chains” two of his own affiliate links – his DAP affiliate link and CB affiliate link – like shown below, then same affiliate will get both CB commission as well as DAP commission. Again, double commissions but to same person.

http://YourSite.com/dap/a/?a=1234&p=http://hop.clickbank.net…./

3) If buyer arrives ONLY through JVZOO affiliate link, and ends up purchasing through JVZOO payment processor, but the buyer has a different DAP affiliate’s cookie from a link he clicked on at some point before (but did not purchase at that time, say), then both JVZOO affiliate and DAP affiliate will get credit (double commissions on same purchase, but to two different affiliates).

If there’s no DAP cookie on his computer, then only JVZOO affiliate will get the commission.

If the DAP affiliate “chains” two of his own affiliate links – his DAP affiliate link and JVZOO affiliate link – like shown below, then same affiliate will get both JVZOO commission as well as DAP commission. Again, double commissions but to same person.

http://YourSite.com/dap/a/?a=1234&p=http://jvzoo.com/c/1944/17

The Right Setup For Multiple Affiliate Networks

To make sure that you’re not paying double-commissions on purchases, and also to make sure that sales don’t get lost between affiliate networks (and your affiliates losing their commissions in the process), you have to set things up the right way.

The main thing to do, is to create a separate set of the following for each affiliate network:

  • A separate DAP product
  • A separate Sales Page
  • A network-specific buy button on that sales page
  • If it’s a product that is sold through CB or JVZoo or DigiResults (or any of the affiliate networks), then DO NOT set up commissions for that Product in DAP. So that will prevent you paying a commission to, say, a CB affiliate as well as a DAP affiliate for the same purchase.

So the net effect of this, is…

If a CB affiliate sends traffic to a page, that page must have a CB buy link ONLY on that page. If you have, say, a JVZoo button on that same page, and the buyer buys through the JVZoo link, then the CB affiliate will get no commissions for that purchase. Which means, they will stop promoting your product because you’re basically funnelling off their visitors to a different affiliate network.

Similarly, the landing page for JVZoo affiliates must have only JVZoo buy buttons.

Landing page for a regular payment processor – like Paypal or Authorize.net – should have only a Paypal and/or Authorize.net buy button (and no CB or JVZoo buy buttons). In this case, for these products in DAP, you should set up an affiliate commission row on the “Affiliates > Manage” screen, so that your DAP affiliates can get credited for sales made through your regular web site.

 

12

Upgrading or Downgrading of Subscriptions

There are two main items that need to be addressed when it comes to a member wanting to Upgrade or Downgrade their Subscription from one membership “level” (a.k.a “Product” in DAP) to another.

1) Modifying the actual recurring payments to reflect the new amount

2) Giving them appropriate access as per the upgrade (or downgrade)

So let’s see how both of these are accomplished.

1) Modifying Recurring Payments

You do need to take some manual action for this. The way to do it is….

  • Ask your members to sign up for the new product/level/subscription separately, like it were a new sign up
  • Cancel their old subscription manually. When using Paypal standard, this can be done by both you (as the admin) and the member themselves. But with all of the other payment solutions, you (the admin) will have to log in to the payment gateway (Authorize.net or Paypal Website Payments Pro) and manually delete the member’s old subscription). DAP will not automatically remove users old subscription profile in your payment gateway.

2) Giving your member access to new level

Set up automation rules using DAP’s Product Chaining feature, so that if they sign up for one Product (or “level”), they’re automatically removed from another Product (or level).

So if they are currently signed up to your “Gold Membership”, then when they sign up afresh for the “Platinum Membership”, then set up a Product Chaining rule that says, “If member signs up for Platinum Membership, then remove them from Gold Membership”. This is just to make sure that they don’t have access to two products (or “levels”) at the same time.

5

Optimizing Your WordPress Blog For Speed

If you want to speed up your web site, you must address the core issue, which is — your web site is getting more traffic than your web server (web hosting account) can handle.

So here are a few ways in which you can speed up your web site:

  • The easiest thing you can do is to revisit all of your plugins that you have enabled and see if you still need all of them. Remember that every single additional plugin running on your site, adds some overhead to (basically, “slows down”) your web site or blog. So use only as few plugins as you absolutely must. With so many cool plugins freely available for WordPress, it is very easy to get carried away, and install tens of plugins, most of them adding very little value, but sometimes causing the most overhead in terms of server resources. So keep only a bare minimum of other plugins (some social plugins are a real pain – making calls to third-party web sites to get their information from).
  • Using a “cache” plugin for speeding up your site is like putting band-aid on a gaping wound. It’s only a temporary fix, and not a real long-term solution, but every bit helps. We recommend WP Super Cache, and be sure to whitelist all of your member pages from getting cached.
  • Make sure you are always using the latest version of WordPress, or at worst, one version behind the very latest and greatest (you definitely want to be sure first that there are no conflicts with other critical plugins that you’re using on your site).
  • Make sure you update all of the plugins and themes you’re using to their individual latest versions (get rid of every single plugin and theme that you’re not using).
  • If you are hosting on a shared (a.k.a “cheap”) web host paying just a few dollars a month for hosting, then your web site is basically competing for server resources (like memory and bandwidth and database access) with possibly tens (or even hundreds) of other web sites on that same server (many may not belong to you, but to others with whom you are sharing the server – and hence the name “shared hosting”). Search for the keywords “digg effect” or “slashdot effect” on Google, and you’ll see how many WordPress sites crash when a link to the site appears among the top results in popular social sites like Digg.com, Reddit.com or Slashdot.com.If your traffic levels have outgrown your server, then the best thing you can do is to upgrade to a bigger server, or get a Virtual Private Server, or even get a dedicated host, depending on your budget. See our recommended web hosts list.
7

Hiding Protected Links On Member Home Page

When you have hundreds of posts or pages protected as part of a DAP Product, the list of links on the DAP Member Home Page (that is the result of using the merge tag %%USERLINKS%%) can get quite long and unwieldy.

So you can choose to hide some of those links from being displayed on the member’s home page.

Here’s how you hide a link from being shown on the member’s home page…

1) Go to the DAP Product in question, scroll down to the ContentResponder section

2) Click on the edit link next to the content in question on the right. The “Edit Files” popup will then show up on the left.

3) Set “Display On User’s Home Page” to “N”.

That’s it.

The content is still part of that product, it is still being protected, but the link simply won’t be displayed on the member home page.

13

DAP Login Xpress

What Is “Login Xpress”?

“Login Xpress” is a DAP feature that enables your members to be logged right into your membership site immediately upon completion of their purchase.

This is roughly how it works:

  • Visitor arrives at your web site
  • On your sales page, they click on any “Buy” button to purchase a Product (or Membership Level)
  • They’re taken to the checkout page (depending on Payment processor being used) and they enter their payment information and hit “Submit”
  • When they hit “Submit” to complete their payment, their payment is processed right away, and the buyer is immediately transferred back to your web site, in real time, and automatically logged in to your membership site, and they are taken to the “Welcome” page or “Members” page (you may choose what this page is going to be at a per-Product level)

Payment Processors That Work With Login Xpress

DAP supports this feature with the following payment processors:

  • Paypal Standard (DAP-generated buttons only – will not work with Paypal-hosted buy buttons that you generate from within your Paypal account)
  • 1Shoppingcart / 1SiteAutomation.com
  • Authorize.net

If you use any of the payment options above, then you can set up your sales funnel in such a way that buyers are logged in right away immediately after purchase.

Payment Processors That DO NOT Work With Login Xpress (Yet)

  • Paypal Website Payments Pro
  • ClickBank
  • e-Junkie
  • WorldPay

DAP integrates with the above processors via some kind of “back-end payment notification” – similar to Paypal’s “IPN” (Instant Payment Notification). Which means the notification between the payment processor and DAP on your site only happens on the “back-end”. Which is why DAP can only deliver the login details to the buyer via an email, and cannot log them in right away (like it can do with “Login Xpress”), because the buyer’s information is available to DAP only when the payment processor sends out the IPN notification behind-the-scenes, so to speak.

So if you’re using the above processors to accept online payments, then what you need to do, is to redirect your buyers to a static “Thank You” page that has a message similar to the one below…

“Thank you for your purchase. In a few minutes, please check your email address used during purchase for your log in details to log in to the members’ area and access the product you just purchased.”

And behind the scenes, DAP would’ve already received the payment notification from the payment processor, and it would’ve created an account for your buyer, given them access to the purchased product, and sent them the “Thank-you Email” for the product(s).

3

Recommended Refund Policy

There really is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to refund policies.

There are so many factors involved. The main one being, that Visa/Master/Amex/Paypal all give a buyer up to 60 days to ask for a refund, at least with most merchants.

Unless you’ve already negotiated the refund terms with your merchant account provider, and have both specifically agreed that there would be no refunds (like say, if you were selling an expensive item, like a car, or a boat, or a service), or that it’s only going to be a 30-day refund period, then you really have no control over the refund period. You just have to comply with at least the mandatory 60-day refund period required by the credit card companies.

So that brings us to the question:

How much should you set your refund period to be within DAP?

Now remember, it is this Refund Period setting (under Setup > Config > Advanced) that also makes affiliates eligible for payment.

So it really comes down to the question:

What is the waiting period for an affiliate to get paid for a referral?

Our recommendation: 60 days.

That’s because if you end up paying too soon (say like within 15 or 30 days), and then the buyer comes back and asks for a refund, now you’re out-of-pocket for the affiliate commissions that you have already paid on a purchase that you just refunded.

Now remember that when you do the actual refund within DAP, DAP will roll-back any commissions credited towards this purchase. If you have not yet paid your affiliates, then in the next report, it will ignore the refunded purchase, and will not calculate commissions on that purchase.

But if you have already paid your affiliates (like within 15 or 30 days after purchase), then DAP will include the negative commission in the next pay-period’s report. And any future commissions earned by this affiliate will be accordingly adjusted.

However, if the affiliate doesn’t refer any more members, then you have two choices at this point:

1) Ask the affiliate to pay back the over-paid commissions

2) Just swallow the loss, write it up to the cost of doing business, and move on.

Content Protection, Security and DRM

We frequently get asked questions like…

“Can DAP protect my Videos/PDF’s/Audio files from being copied? Is there some kind of tracking that I can build into my videos that will let me track the video on torrent sites?”

“Can DAP prevent people from downloading my videos/audio/pdf and uploading it to a torrent or third-party site?”

“Can DAP force people to only watch my videos online? I don’t want my members to download any of my content to their hard disk – I want to force them to see/read/hear/watch everything online.”

Short Answer: No.

Long Answer: Keep reading…

The Nitty-Gritty

There are so many ways to steal your content from your web site – no matter what technology you use.

Let us explain what that means…

1) Let’s say you implement a technology where only paying members can even get to your videos. Like you can already do with DAP. So then a paying member can download your video because they are already a paying member, and they actually have access to the videos. And once your video has been downloaded to their hard disk, you have lost all control over it – no matter what anyone tells you, that’s the truth. Because they can upload it to any illegal warez sharing site, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Of course, you could spend all your time, money and efforts monitoring the thousands of illegal sharing sites whether your video or ebook is found anywhere – assuming you can even find it in the first place, which would be like finding a needle in a hay stack – no, make that “hay factory” – wait, make that “finding a needle in New York City” – and then write to those site owners and ask them to take it down.

Or you could focus on the 99% of legitimate members of your site, and create great content for them, and keep them paying month after month, and sell more products to them, and keep them happy.

2) Let’s say you use a plugin that only allows true-streaming – like one based on Amazon CloudFront technology, that will not allow the users to directly download your videos, but force them to watch online only. Then there’s any number of “screen-capture” tools – even free ones – that your members can use to capture another video of your video, and then share it with their friends, or upload to illegal sharing sites.

The list goes on and on. No matter how hard you make it, there’s always going to be a way around.

So, unless you’re a NASA, NetFlix, or Amazon or Apple who has a real reason to protect their content that is worth real millions of dollars, there is *no technology* available today that will let you track a video or pdf *after* it has been downloaded. If someone is saying they can do this, then they’re outright lying to you, and playing on your fears.

DAP already has a built-in password-sharing prevention security built in. If someone tries to share their account info with others, DAP will lock their account the moment their account gets log-ins from multiple IP’s (you can configure this setting) and deny further access to any of their content, until you investigate the user and “un-lock” their account.

DAP already protects all of your media from illegal access.

DAP also prevents your Amazon S3 videos and audio and other content from being accessed by anyone directly. Using a script like http://S3MediaVault.com , you can make it such that your videos and audio and other media can only be downloaded from approved sites (where the plugin is installed), and then on top of that, there’s DAP already sitting like a monster watch-dog, making sure only authorized users can even get into the site in the first place.

So hope that helps if you’ve gotten too worried about protecting your content – so worried that you’re missing the big picture.

Don’t Forget What Is Important (Hint: It starts with “Mem” and ends with “bers”)

The best membership sites allow people to consume the content they’ve paid for in multiple ways – view the video, download the video, download mp3 audio version of the video, download the presentation as a powerpoint, download the transcripts as a PDF, and so on.

Instead of making it easy for your members to download the content, if you’re going to spend your limited resources trying to figure out how to prevent people from downloading content that they’ve actually paid for, and force people to only view your content online and not be able to view it offline (like in their spare time or when going for a jog in the park), you run the risk of upsetting 99% of your legitimate paying members, in order to secure your content from the 1% of pirates, who will steal and share your content no matter what.

So forget about the 1%, and focus on the 99%. DAP already has enough security in place to stop the 1%. So don’t worry about that. Your content is very secure with DAP.

Anything else is just a total waste of your time. So don’t get distracted by the noise, and just get on with the real important tasks on hand: Building a long-term recurring income stream by building a large community of highly satisfied, loyal fans who are thrilled about what you have to offer, and will continue to pay month after month because whatever it is that you’re selling, is making their life better in some way.

The hardest thing to do online, with a membership site is still this: Creating great content, Attracting buyers, and then getting your members to keep paying month after month.

And that, is the big picture.

23

2-Tier Affiliate Program

DAP supports (up to) a 2-tier affiliate program. So you could pay just one level (“tier”) of commissions (A gets paid when he refers B), or you could also set up DAP to pay 2 “tiers” of commissions (User 1 gets paid when he refers User 2 AND User 1 also gets paid something when User 2 refers User 3).

[NOTE: Paypal has an Acceptable Use Policy – especially for a product or service that could be considered “MLM” or “Pyramid”. Make sure you’re not violating their terms. For eg., requiring your members to keep paying subscription fees in order to remain an affiliate, could be considered a Pyramid scheme. So, in general (nothing to do with using DAP or paying 2 levels of commissions), if you are running an affiliate program and will be paying out commissions via Paypal, make sure you are not violating their terms.]

How The 2-Tier Affiliate Program Works

In a typical “1-Tier” affiliate program, when a buyer makes a purchase, the affiliate who referred the buyer is the only one who gets paid an affiliate commission. Which is why it’s called “1-tier”, because there’s only one level of commissions paid.

However, in a “2-tier” affiliate program, the “Affiliate’s Affiliate” (2nd level above) can also be paid a portion of the sale in commissions.

So consider this this example…

You are selling Product A that costs $100.

You’ve set up your commission structure for Product A as follows:

Tier 1: 50% Per Sale

Tier 2: 10% Per Sale

Joe Customer is referred by Charlie to your web site. Joe went on to purchase Product A for which commissions are set up above.

So Charlie (tier-1 affiliate) gets paid 50% of the sale – which is $50.

Now, normally a 1-tier affiliate program would stop there, and that would be the end of affiliate commissions for that purchase. But you have set up 2 tiers.

So now DAP looks at who referred Charlie, the affiliate. It finds that David originally referred Charlie to your web site (regardless of how Charlie got in to your membership site).

So now David (tier-2 affiliate) gets paid 10% of the sale – which is $10.

So for that one sale of $100, $50 was paid to Charlie, and $10 was paid to David, which totals $60.

So $40 is your earnings, as the site owner.

How To Set It Up

The 2-tier or “n” tier setup is the exact same as the 1-tier setup.

Only difference is, set up a new record on the “Affiliates > Set Commissions” page for each tier – one for Tier 1, one for Tier 2, and so on.

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