ProBlogger: 10 Tools To Help Protect Your Blog From Content Theft

---

10 Tools To Help Protect Your Blog From Content Theft Posted: 23 Jul 2013 08:19 AM PDT This is a guest contribution from Adam Connell, blogger at Bloggingwizard.com. If you write or publish a blog, you’ll inevitably experience the gut-wrenching feeling of content theft at some point in the life of your blog. It’s not fair but it’s now just part of the world of online content. What can you do to protect the content you slaved over? There is no 100% fool-proof way to protect your content, but you can make it more difficult for content thieves to steal your work and to punish them when they do. I’m going to share some ways you can protect your content from theft and give you some resources to use to defend it against thieves and scrapers. How Do You Know If Your Content Has Been Stolen?  Posting a copyright notice on your blog is a deterrent, albeit a small one. A copyright notice lets would-be content thieves know that you understand your rights to the fruits of your labor and that you intend to protect them. Nevertheless, not everyone is going to be deterred by your copyright notice. The following online tools can be used to discover whether your content has been stolen or not. What you do after that is another story. Google Alerts Google Alerts are simple e-mail alerts you can establish by notifying Google that you want to keep tabs on certain keywords or phrases. Copy a unique phrase in your blog post or the title of your post and ask Google to send you an e-mail any time it is published elsewhere on the Web. Use a plagiarism checker There are several plagiarism checkers online. All of them have their benefits. Grammarly is a proofreading service and grammar checker, but it will also check your text against plagiarism. Plagium is another one. However, unlike Grammarly, you can check an entire URL to see if your content has been plagiarized. While Grammarly and Plagium both are good services, Copyscape is more recognized. Like Plagium, you can check an entire URL for plagiarism, and you can put a “Protected By Copyscape” notice on your blog, which should scare away a few content scrapers. All three services have a free service level and a premium paid service for high volume users. Small Steps To Protecting Your Content From Theft While Google Alerts and plagiarism checkers can tell you that someone has used your content without your permission, there are other things you can do to protect your content. These are small steps that help you maintain a little control over your content and ensure that you at least get attribution should someone use your content without your approval. WordPress SEO by Yoast This WordPress plugin is useful if you are using the standalone WordPress software. The plugin has a feature that allows you to add some code to your RSS feed so that if your post is republished elsewhere, then an automatic link will be inserted pointing back to your website. Some blogs use scraper software to automatically republish content from around the Web. No human is looking at these posts. If your blog is included among the URLs added to the scraper script, then you’ll at least get a link back. Don’t count on that link being very valuable, but it is there. Tynt Tynt is a service that provides code for you to insert into your web pages and will also tell you how many times your content has been copied and pasted. When someone copies and pastes your content, Tynt will add a link back to your website. Google Authorship Google Authorship is a content marketing strategy that associates your name or brand with your content in Google’s search index. By implementing Google Authorship you are increasing your chances of retaining control over your content by having your photo image appear next to your content in the search rankings. While that won’t stop content thieves from scraping your content, it will make it easier to prove the content is yours and it will be easier to have stolen content removed when you file a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaint. Learn more about Google Authorship here. What You Should Do If Your Content Has Been Stolen It is not always necessary to confront a content thief. You have to determine if there’s any real damage to your content being stolen. First, ask yourself if the person is profiting from your content. If they are, then that’s a red flag. Secondly, ask if your reputation may be damaged by someone claiming that content. And thirdly, ask if it’s worth your trouble to pursue the content thief. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. So let’s say that you determine you want to pursue the content thief and have them remove your content. Your first step should be to send them a friendly letter by e-mail, or by using their contact form, and asking them to remove your content. Alternatively, you can ask them to link back to your website. If that doesn’t work, then you’ll have to take other measures. You can start by finding out where their website is being hosted and contact the hosting company. Let the hosting company know that they are hosting a website that is stealing content. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the hosting company is obligated to prevent access to websites that have infringed on someone’s copyright. WhoIsHostingThis.com You need to find out who is hosting the website that stole your content. That’s where Who Is Hosting This comes in. Once you know who is hosting the website, you can then send a DMCA request to the hosting company to have the website taken down. Remove content from Google To have content removed from Google’s search index, you’ll have to file a DMCA request with Google. One Final Step To Combatting Plagiarism: Creative Commons As I noted earlier, copyright notices are small deterrents. The same goes for Creative Commons. However, Creative Commons licenses are becoming more acceptable and more popular. If people know that you don’t mind them using your content for benevolent purposes, they are more likely to respect your right to that content and its privileges. Creative Commons You can learn about the various Creative Common licenses on the Creative Commons website. It’s a wild Web out there Be diligent in protecting your content and you will reap the benefits of it for a long time to come. What sort of experiences have you had with content theft? Whether you have successfully stopped people from stealing your content or not, we'd love to hear about it. Adam Connell is an internet marketing and SEO nut from the UK. He can be found blogging over at Bloggingwizard.com, where he talks about marketing, social media, SEO and a few other topics. Follow him on Twitter @adamjayc. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger 10 Tools To Help Protect Your Blog From Content Theft

You are subscribed to email updates from @ProBlogger To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610

Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

---

Are you a Social Media Star? I hope not! Posted: 23 Jul 2013 10:43 AM PDT In case you haven’t heard the news, there is currently a casting call for Social Media Stars reality show (yes, really).  Because apparently watching people tweet and pin all day is entertaining.  Oh wait, I could just go out for dinner with friends and see the exact same thing, but with alcohol!  But I digress. First, to go on such a show, you have to be a third rate attention whore.  We all know of Shoemoney's desire to land a spot on Big Brother, but that is a nationally televised hit reality program and spawns discussion on all kinds of reality tv and celebrity gossip sites.  Hardly a negative thing when you are a Shoemoney looking for publicity.  And what is Social Media Stars?  Something that will just be aired online, unless some random network picks it up – which could be a network anywhere in the world, since the show's casting call is worldwide. But first, here is the pitch: Social Media Stars Reality Show is looking for YOU! This is your shot at stardom! Live in a Miami Beach mansion, hang with fellow superstars and engage in social media challenges to show your stuff! From the creators of Top Recruiter: The Competition, comes Social Media Stars, another surefire success from LaVoie Entertainment. Are you legendary on LinkedIn, a prodigy on Pinterest, talented on Twitter and fabulous on Facebook? If your friends ask you to "teach them Twitter" and their jaws drop when you're done, we want YOU! Cheesy enough for you?  And how many social media stars, or even third rate stars, do you know wearing a suit and tie and oozing that much, well, sleaze? First, let's say you were remotely interested (it's okay, just say you were "curious").  You fancy yourself a social media star.  You could brag about your Twitter followers, your Facebook friends, your Instagram followers or your Klout score.  But no, apparently despite their pitch, Social Media Stars doesn't care about any of that when you apply.  What is the only social media platform that Social Media Stars is interested in when it comes to choosing their stars?  LinkedIn.  Freakin LinkedIn.  Not that LinkedIn doesn't have its uses, but if I am picking out social media rock stars, LinkedIn sure wouldn't be the only social media following I looked at, let alone the ONLY one – in fact, I wouldn't even look at it that closely compared to other social media venues.  So why does Social Media Stars consider it to be the only one worth noting? Really, would anyone but those people desperate enough for any kind of notoriety go on a social media stars reality show where the guys running it clearly have no idea on what makes a social media star?  They really should be looking at things like Twitter followers – or more precisely ratio of Twitter followers.  After all, 18,000 followers looks impressive until you see they are following 52,000 people.  Or look at their engagement with their followers and the number of retweets.  But no, Social Media Stars knows social media well enough that LinkedIn is the only thing that matters.  Definitely sounds like a show I’d want to participate in! According to an interview Creator and Executive Producer Chris Lavoie did with an Australian newspaper, there are only going to be 5 contestants (that's it?  How entertaining will that be…. Not).  And the challenges?  Well, instead of the contestants huddled over their laptops (and come on, you know you were already anticipating someone inadvertently alt-tabbing to their porn tab or seeing an inappropriate Gmail message popping up at the bottom of their screen while everyone was watching), they are sending the contestants to do "creative" challenges. Okay, I get that laptop huddling isn't the best showcase for getting a network pickup, but that IS what social media is.  Geeky guys and gals hovering over their computers working their social media magic.  Not many go pounding the pavement for resulting social media goodness, unless it was to score clients. He also wants gossip, drama and controversy.  But he wants it to have "a touch of class".  Face palming already? And what does he want in those 5 contestants?  According to that same news article: So you think you can social media? Here’s what it takes: 1. Personality 2. Social Media Fan Base 3. What their personal brand says to the audience 4. Diversity 5. Stellar Resumes 6. Comfortable in front of the camera 7. A unique sense of style/fashion 8. I try not to bring on Diva’s Well, last I checked, resumes are about the LAST thing anyone in this industry needs in order to show off their social media skills.  In fact, I am willing to bet most of the people I consider social media stars do NOT have a stellar resume in the traditional sense (or even a non-traditional sense), unless you could count things like gaining # of shares for clients as being part of a stellar resume. So if you want to be one of the 5 Social Media Stars, you better start spamming everyone you know with LinkedIn requests and buying some fancy internet degrees for resume padding, because that is what they seem to care about when choosing contestants. Oh, and they want a photo, so if you are a hot chick wearing a tight and skimpy tank top, you are probably in even if you have no LinkedIn account and have 18 Twitter followers.  Because let’s face it, sex sells, especially if it happens between contestants.  Remember the cringe worthy GoDaddy commercial with the hot chick and the geek?   Okay, sorry, you were still probably trying to burn your eyeballs to unsee that, but every reality show has to have a hot chick and a geek. And if you are considering it, do anticipate that the industry's real stars will make fun of you… A LOT.  You will pretty much be laughed out of the industry for the attention whore you are.  Well, unless Shoemoney is one of the chosen few.  Then I'll have to forgive him, but not before giving him a super hard time Trying to increase your Google rank that is like no other?

You are subscribed to email updates from ShoeMoney Internet Marketing Blog To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610