Since the 1990s, blogging has been an incredibly popular way of sharing your thoughts, documenting your travels or even earning some cash - for individuals and businesses alike. And in our digital world, it's vital for companies to establish a strong online presence, whether their brand is personal or professional. Writing and publishing blog posts is great for networking and community building as well as being an effective form of self-expression.
The Business Of Blogging
Businesses, both commercial and non-profit, often choose to gain exposure and increase customer engagement through the use of content marketing. This is, essentially, a fancy term for producing content (written, visual or audio) and publishing it to grab the attention of potential customers. Blog posts are one of the most effective forms of content marketing and these are usually informative articles on a niche or field subject with links leading to the brand's website or landing page. Writing and sharing blog posts enhances the image of a brand and lends it authority - particularly when shared by other established businesses or when guest blogging (writing posts for another brand or individual's blog site).
A blog is an extremely important part of a brand's identity and, as such, it's important to:
● Make sure that the content is of good quality
● Ensure that the blog is updated regularly
● Proactively detect plagiarism
● Actively prevent content theft
Avoiding plagiarism in your work
Plagiarism and content theft are more common than you might think and can quickly damage the reputation of your brand and, in some cases, can even result in legal action. It has to be stressed that, in many cases, plagiarism is not deliberate. Lots of people will inadvertently reproduce a sentence or paragraph simply because the subject that they're writing about has been covered by many other writers. In this section, we're sharing tips to
check plagiarism (copying of your work) and protect your blog posts.
Plagiarism checkers
These are online tools that do the heavy lifting for you in terms of identifying plagiarism. These checkers are able to quickly scan your document and then, using a vast database and AI-driven algorithms, scour the internet for work featuring similar content, tone, patterns and style.
A plagiarism checker will check your content against billions of different sources and then produce a detailed report including URLs of sources where potential problems may be. Increasingly sophisticated, these tools even allow you to set your own parameters including the proportions of plagiarized text that you're interested in. For the serious blogger, a plagiarism checker is an essential bit of kit that will help to ensure that your work is original and that you're not stepping on another blogger's toes.
Keep your eyes on the prize with manual checks
As great as digital tools are, there are some things that require good old-fashioned legwork - and this includes checking sources and citations. It's fine to
use quotes or observations by others to reinforce points in your blog posts but these must be credited correctly. When quoting another writer, you should include either a link to that original work or that person's name and the original publication date of the work.
Before publishing your blog post, you need to double-check that:
● Your sources and citations are correct
● Your research is factual and from reliable sources
● You haven't inadvertently plagiarized somebody's work either in whole or in part
● You haven't replicated or copied another writer's unique writing style
Although doing this manually can be a little laborious and time-consuming, it's also really important. Ensuring that your work is factual and correctly cited will lend it authority and will therefore help you to gain the kind of audience that you want.
If you'd like to learn more about what we provide, why not take a look at how we can help?
Boost your skills with our market-leading online courses at super-low prices.
Start your engines
Another effective way of checking your content for plagiarism is to use a search engine such as Google. Although Google shouldn't be taken as Gospel in terms of 100% accuracy, it will give you a good indication of the originality of your work. To do this, simply copy your text and paste it into the Google search bar. The Gods of Google will then present you with articles which may contain similar content. If you choose, you can do this with just a sentence or paragraph. As well as helping you to detect possible issues, this technique can also help you protect your own content from plagiarism.
Thwarting Thieves And Protecting Your Blog Posts
So far, we've talked mainly about avoiding plagiarizing others in your work but now it's time to focus on protecting your own blog posts from pesky plagiarists. In this section, we'll look at some simple ways of keeping copycats at bay.
Monitoring and alerts
First things first, it's a really good idea to set up some
Google Alerts for your work. You can do this by heading over to Google.com/alerts and then typing in the word or phrase that you want to track. Google will then ping you an alert when those words or phrases turn up in other articles published online.
It's also sensible to get into the habit of doing a manual search on a regular basis to check on your protected content.
Both of these things can be a great way of setting up an early warning system in the event that somebody publishes content the same as or similar to yours without permission or due credits.
Fire off a warning shot
As the old saying goes, “prevention is better than a cure” - and this very much applies here. Add a clear disclaimer to the end of your content warning would-be copy thieves that your content is original and plagiarism will not be tolerated. If you're thinking that people might just simply go ahead and copy it anyway, you'd be right - however, this could later help you in making a case if you decide to take action against an act of plagiarism.
Going the legal route
If your work is particularly important to you (for example if you intend to publish it as part of a book in the future) you may also consider registering your published content with the copyright office to ensure legal protection for your intellectual assets. This will very much help your case if plagiarism does occur. Similarly, using a Creative Commons License to set definite terms of use for others as well as protecting your intellectual assets.
Picture perfect protection
In many - if not most - cases, a blog post will feature visual content such as photographs, video, graphics and infographics and these too can be stolen by other bloggers.
You can protect your precious visuals by:
● Placing a watermark on visual content featuring your name or logo
● Stamping a small signature mark on each visual
● Including a warning in your content as you would for your written work
● Leveraging metadata fields by inserting your author name, website URL and details about your visuals
Watermarks and signatures are particularly effective as a would-be plagiarist will be reluctant to publish an image that clearly (and visually) does not belong to them.
As with your other work, you should get into the habit of regularly scanning the web - both manually and using an advanced AI Image search tool to detect any unauthorized use of your content. Once detected, you can then take steps to prohibit that person from using your work again such as including an inbound link to your website.
The Wrap
Comprehensive detection and protection are vital when it comes to ensuring originality and integrity in your work. You would be surprised at how many bloggers come a cropper with plagiarists simply because they don't know how to prevent or detect devious activity. By following the tips in this article, you can help to make sure that your work stays original - and that it stays where it belongs; on your blog!
