When plagiarism is GOOD!

This post has been a long time coming - I first promised it in February, but it is an important one for anyone wanting to promote their web site for more traffic, visitors and sales.

The premise is this - you want people to plagiarise your web site. OK its not strictly plagiarism, but it looks like it to many people, and here's the difference. When you plagiarise someone it involves using their material (text, copyrighted works) without their permission, and passing it off as your own. This is a bad and dishonest thing. On the web you can plagiarise if you want, and this is sometimes referred to as "scraping": i.e. "someone has scraped content from my site". However you can also use people's content in a legitimate way.

How this works is that you see some text that you would like to use, comment on, add something to, or that you value for whatever reason. You may take this text, and use it on your blog or web site. The only condition is that while doing so you like back to the original source, thereby giving credit to the author. This becomes the equivalent of an academic citation, rather than just down and dirty plagiarism. OK so its not really plagiarism at all. You may chose to republish their work as is, add comments to it, criticise it (be polite and not personal), or use it in another way, but you must give credit to the author, in the form of a "back link" to their site, where the words were originally published.

So Who Cares about this?
Well you should.

In the first instance this allows you to legitimately use others content in your own site, and if its good relevant stuff and you are busy, its a good way of giving your readers valuable information and developing the relationship with a minimum of effort. Having said that, original content is really better, if you have time this week to make a post. When you don't have the time, re-publish. This is effectively the same as news media using syndicated content from agencies like Reuters - which we happily consume in the papers and on television every day.

However even more important is this, and this is the crux of the article.

I'll shout this one out....
IF YOU CAN CREATE CONTENT GOOD ENOUGH THAT IT PERSUADES OTHERS TO USE AND LINK TO IT, THEN YOU WILL BE DEVELOPING THE NUMBER OF LINKS TO YOUR SITE, AS WELL AS ITS REPUTATION AND VISITOR TRAFFIC.

And the point of links to your site is: they are gold dust. They tell search engines that your site is valuable, they bring visitors and "Page Rank" to your site. They raise your site up in the search engine lists, they bring your site more well targeted visitors, and in the final analysis, those visitors are your opportunity to make money on the web. Another term for content that persuades others to link to it is "Link Bait", and its a concept of vital importance to any web marketer.

So how do you persuade others to plagiarise (OK cite) or otherwise reuse your content? Well firstly, it has to be good.
And what do we mean by good? Well it can be anything that other people want to link to.

So here are some examples of things so good that they can be used to generate inbound links.

1. Interesting and informative comment.
2. Add new value or information for your readers.
3. Comment or respond to others web sites in your own market place.
4. Humour - jokes can go round the world.
5. Controversy - you may make a criticism (be careful with this one), or talk on a point of topical interest.
6. Video. A video posted on your site and You Tube can be linked to from all over the web - if its link-worthy.
7. Pod casting - a voice recording of interest to your market can attract incoming links.
8. Blog Posts. Many bloggers link to other blogs that they like and value.
9. Software. Many sites offer free downloads of simple software products. If you have the capacity to build software then great, otherwise don't worry. One of the highest ranked sites in the world is adobe.com - why, because every site that uses PDF files provides a link to them along the lines of "click here to get Adobe PDF reader". The perfect online marketing campaign.
10. Post a story from your blog onto Digg, del.icio.us, stumble, or any of the other tagging sites, in the hope that other readers will value your content, link to it, and increase the number of links back to you.
    
11. See this article I blogged recently about the power of good content, and particularly the genius link building campaign of Cameron Olthuis.
    

For other ideas about link-baiting, and some ideas which you may be able to put into practice, see this article by Jim Westergren. (See we're doing it again: he writes it, its good, I like it, I link to it, I provide you with some additional value, you receive that value, you say "thanks Pete, thanks Jim", you put it into practice, your web site gets more visitors. Everyone wins. Plagiarism can be good!)

So next time you look at my blog and see I have used someone else's content on a busy day, remember - its OK to use it if you don't have time to write your own. When I linked to the article I sent traffic and page rank to the site of the author. When the author wrote his or her article, that is exactly what he / she was hoping I would do.