I recently noticed a web forum where people were giving away access information to some of my products.
I did it by setting up a Google Alert for the URL to my thank you page. A Google Alert allows you to tell Google to send you an email whenever they find a certain word, phrase, or in this case a URL.
If Google finds a link to your thank you page that you didn’t authorize, you found a crook.
After about a month I finally was alerted that someone was sharing my URL. It was inside of a forum where people freely share links to digital products they purchased or stole.
And it turns out I got lucky by discovering my product was being given away inside. Usually they disguise the URL so that Google Alerts isn’t able to discover it. This thief messed up this time.
So what did I do about it? Nothing so far. What would you recommend?
I’m considering moving to all physical products. What do you think about that?
The ugly irony in all of this is that the thief praised the guy who gave him my free link because “Copywriting is SO important.”
Do you think the thief will use my product to help him create sales copy for his digital product? Wouldn’t be a surprise. Why wouldn’t a thief also be a hypocrite?