How to Share Your Digital Content Securely with a Limited Audience

1. Use Two-Factor Authentication

Digital content has become central for business and customer/client engagement. 

Protecting your digital experiences is of paramount importance now that the incidents of content theft have increased dramatically. 

One way to ensure digital content security is to use two-factor authentication.

If you want a limited audience to access your content, you should ensure that they provide valid credentials. Additionally, you can also set controls such as what form of content they can access. 

There are many web applications available these days through which you can securely share your digital content with a verified, limited audience.

The user credentials can include elements such as:

• Username
• Password
• Security Questions
• CAPTCHA
• Personal Identifiable Information (PII)

2. Incorporate Watermarks in Infographics

If your content includes infographics, you can secure them through watermarks. Without digital content security, your unique images or infographics are left unprotected for anyone to lift and use. 

A good practice is to add your logo or brand name to your images as a watermark that would make your content a distinguished property. This way, even if someone downloads or copies the infographic, they cannot do so without displaying the watermark. You can choose any watermarking software service available online for that purpose. 

3. Verify Your Social Media Accounts

Content spreads on social media like wildfire. It is arguably the most challenging endeavor to secure your content shared on various social media platforms.

While it may not be possible to completely avoid counterfeits and copyright infringements, you can certainly try to verify your social media accounts. That way, your audience can differentiate your official page from those that have copied yours. With rising brand exposure, it becomes crucial to review the platforms and take appropriate action in case of infringement.  

4. Restrict Regional Access

Do you want your content to only reach an audience from a specific region? It’s possible to implement digital content security by restricting regional access. 

You can geo-fence your content by limiting the audience residing in a particular country, zip code, and region. Any individual who does not reside in the location set by you will not be able to access your content. This step becomes necessary especially when you license your content using a third-party that blacklists and whitelists users by viewing their IP address. 

5. Encrypt Your Digital Content

Gone are the days of lacklustre websites with static images and text. In this day and age, websites have become highly personalized and dynamic. 

They store PII such as:

• Names
• Addresses
• Emails
• Credit card numbers

If you are a content creator who owns a website, it’s urgent that you encrypt your data. One of the ways to do so is through server-side scripting.

You need not be a programmer to encrypt your data as you can always outsource this task to a third-party. 

In an event of a breach, the personally identifiable information of users will still remain protected using encryption. 

Related Read: 7 Ways to Protect Your eBooks from Online Piracy Now! 

6. Review Your Target Keywords

Are you aiming for specific keywords to rank your digital content?

Due to a lack of appropriate security measures, a competitor may use your content to rank themselves on search engines such as Google.

This is entirely possible as explained by Search Engine Watch in a case study where stolen content received more traction than the original one!

The internet is a vast space and it’s not possible to scan an infinite number of websites and web pages to identify duplicate content.

For this reason, you need to analyze the pages ranking for similar keywords as yours. This shortlisting method will help you determine if your content has been plagiarized and is, unfortunately, gaining traction.

What Should You Do If You Detect Plagiarism?

If you do find that your content is being used by someone else, it’s best to first reach out to them via email. Ask them to bring down the content and wait for at least a week for their response. 

If you still see your content up on their website or social media account, you should consult a lawyer to invoke the copyright infringement act and follow the legal proceedings. 

Also Read: How to Ensure intellectual property Protection for Online Course Content?

7. Digital Content Security Against DDoS Attack

The distributed denial-of-service is a very dangerous form of a cyber attack. A malicious third-party uses a botnet to send several bogus user requests until the server cannot take up any more requests for access. As a result, it denies even legitimate user requests until a ‘ransom’ is paid to the attacker. 

Many professional content delivery networks offer protection against DDoS attacks for digital content security. DDoS mitigation will add another security layer and ensure that your content is available at all times.