I hope everyone’s been enjoying our little trip through some of the cool features the interwebz has to offer. Remember that everything that I’ve shown you is just how I do thing, there are always other ways to use these resources but I just don’t know them all! Today we’re going to talk about doing direct downloads for your freebies, i.e. instead of having your fans clicking on a link, going to another page & clicking on another link to get a freebie all they have to do is click once & the download starts automatically.
If you have your own FTP site then your provider should give you the option to have a direct download link, that’s part of the benefits of having a paid site. For 4shared, a direct download link is only provided when you have a paid account; I’ve done some poking around & haven’t found any other way to get it through 4shared. Mediafire seems to not have the direct download option but I’ve never used them so if any of you wonderful readers know how to do it, let me know!
After some searching, I was able to determine that Box.com only provides direct download links for users who have a paid account. And boy is it hard to search for information on a site that is just called Box, I kept getting definitions from Wikipedia of what a box was! Heehee, back on track now.
You can do direct download through Dropbox.com with a free account but there is a little code you have to add to the URL to make it work. Again, I’m going to cover Dropbox becuase it’s what I know how to do, if you have a paid account on 4shared or Box.com do a search through the help section & they’ll guide you through the steps.
When you upload a file to Dropbox & go to your home page, you’ll see a little link icon to the far right of the file name. Clicking on the icon will open up a new window & the URL that you see is the link to the actual file. Because Dropbox randomizes links, it is highly unlikely that someone will be able to figure out the actual link, so I’m going to show you this using a real example; all the links are clickable so you can see how they work.
When I uploaded my file for a recent blog train & clicked on the link icon I got the following link of https://www.dropbox.com/s/iku39641lswx0xm/dts_SD.zip. If I were to use this link for my freebie as is, clicking on it would take someone to the file page on Dropbox where they would have to click on the Download icon to get the file. That’s cool but I want my followers to get the freebie via direct download. To do this you have two options both of which involve modifying the URL.
Option 1 is to add the code ?dl=1 to the end of the URL. Don’t know how the code actually does it but I know that adding this code will turn your Dropbox URL into a direct download. Adding the code to my URL above gives me the new URL of https://www.dropbox.com/s/iku39641lswx0xm/dts_SD.zip?dl=1. If you click on the link now you’ll see that instead of going to a new screen, you’ll get the download box popping up.
Option 2 is to add the code http://dl to the front of your file URL. To modify the original URL, I change https://www to http://dl which will make the new URL of http://dl.dropbox.com/s/iku39641lswx0xm/dts_SD.zip. Again if you were to click on this link the download box would pop up instead of a new screen. I can’t determine if there’s a difference between Option 1 & Option 2 it’s just that when I was looking for the direct download code, I found Option 1 first & then noticed a few freebies I downloaded used Option 2. Different code, same result!
Next week we’ll cover the last part of this series about how shorten & find out some statistics on how often & from where people are downloading your freebies.
