Has Your Content Been Stolen?

Has your content been stolen? This can happen to any honest blogger who is always writing posts by himself. Someone might simply take advantage out of it and steal whatever posts he likes. There are at least a few different ways you can react in such situation:

1. Remain silent and do not do anything while telling yourself that you do not care about it. Sometimes if is not worth to do anything about it.
2. Contact the scraper by email and ask him to remove the stolen content from his blog. The problem is that he might not listen to you. Sometimes it might be even hard to find a way to contact him.
3. Use a Wordpress plug-in (such as RSS footer from joostdevalk.nl/wordpress/rss-footer/) that will automatically link back to your site from the website of a scraper where he published your post. This plug-in might be very useful if you want to stay informed about any attempts of stealing your content. Of course, simply knowing about your content being published somewhere will not remove it.

Overall, there are not many things you can do if your content is being stolen by some unknown website. On the other hand, webmasters of popular websites may be afraid that you might spread the news of what they did.

March 1st, 2010 - Posted in About Blogging, About Internet, Technology, Websites | | 1 Comments

Blog Directories

Recently, I have been involved in submitting my blog to different directories in order boost the popularity of my blog. Here is the list of directories that you might consider submitting your blog to:

-Blog Flux is weblog directory plus a button maker, Google PageRank checker, and a pinging service.
-BlogStreet features blog profiles, RSS ecosystem, blog “tops”, search and directory.
-Globe of Blogs is an index of weblogs as submitted by their authors.
-LS Blogs is a directory of blogging-related sites: forums, directories and search engines, software and hosts, and blogs.
-Technorati is perhaps the most popular directory. You can submit your photo as well.
-Findory aggregates blogs and recommends content based on users interest. It means that if a user is reading a blog with similar content he may be presented with your blog.
-Blogarama is another popular directory.
-2rss.com is where you can submit your RSS feed.
-Blogdigger is an RSS search engine. Submit your feed here.
-Bloghop allows users to tagsurf blogs that match their interest.

Keep in mind that in most cases editors of those directories will want to review your website before accepting it. Make sure your blog is at least a few weeks/months old and has some original content.

February 11th, 2010 - Posted in About Internet, Websites | | 9 Comments

Domain Name RSS Feed

Every person who starts a new website wants to have the best address possible. By the best I mean the shortest possible and the most related to the content of his website. While choosing domain names, a person has many options available and can create an unlimited number of combinations of words and signs. It is true that the most attractive and the best addresses are already taken, but the good news is that some of them expire or have already been expired and will never be renewed by their owner. If the existing domain has an attractive address it would be a good idea to take it over. One of the best ways to do it is to check what domain names contain the keywords that we would like to use in the composition of our page and its address. To check the availability of such sites there are some tools that can help. Using such tools is very simple. Just insert the keyword that you would like to use, select what extensions that you would like to browse (like .com or .org), and press the search button. What you are going to obtain as a result is the number of sites that match your criteria.

January 21st, 2010 - Posted in Technology, Websites | | 0 Comments

How to Write Guest Posts

There are more and more people writing guest posts, and that is why I feel that it might be a good idea to share my knowledge about how to do it in a proper way. This way you can avoid making mistakes, and your post will look more professional. This in turn will result in many more blogs asking you to guest blog for them. I have a few points I would like to make as the topic is quite complicated.

The most important thing is to understand what the requirements are of such post. There might be a few requirements you will have to fulfill, but often bloggers will tell you directly what they expect from you. In such case you should look at other posts on that blog to see how long they usually are. This way you will be able to estimate whether your post contains the minimum amount of words required. You should be knowledgeable about the topics you write about so consider obtaining real online degrees. You may also want to investigate whether you are expected to include any links, images, or embedded video clips. This is what many guest bloggers do not pay attention to. Later they might be disappointed that they are no longer offered to write any guest posts. To check the number of words you have written, it is a good idea to write a post in Word, as under “Tools” you might be able to find the “Word Count” option. Before sending your post, you can check if all links are working by clicking on them yourself. To see if images or videos are working properly, you might want to see how they are displayed in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and a few other browsers. Putting a lot of work into your guest post is a good idea, because that is a great way to market your blog.

January 13th, 2010 - Posted in About Blogging, About Internet, Websites | | 0 Comments

Blogoholics

Do you ever wonder how many people are blogoholics? Quite often I notice bloggers who are blogging a lot. That is probably due to the fact that they want to increase various rankings like Page Rank and Alexa. Many of them are doing some marketing and focusing on attracting visitors. I think that very few things can be as addictive as blogging. By blogging I not only mean writing and publishing posts, but also staying in touch with other writers and contributing to their blogs. If you give out your personal details to a lot of people on the Internet, then you may be interested in the new LifeLock Command Center.
It might be a good idea to set hours at which you should work on your blog so that you will not be tempted to work throughout the whole day. I wonder how many bloggers would be able to admit that they are blogoholics, and how many blogoholics there actually are out there.

January 11th, 2010 - Posted in About Internet, Websites | | 0 Comments

Hosting a Blog on Your Own Domain

This time I would like to write about advantages and disadvantages of blogs hosted on your own domain name:

-You will have to pay for the domain name and for hosting your domain. This can amount to approximately $150 per year, but it varies depending on which hosting plan you will choose.
-If your blog is hosted on Blogspot you can incorporate AdSense, but Google will take part of the profit. However, you will not need to share your profit with Google if you decide to have your own domain.
-Other bloggers might show more respect towards bloggers who have their blog hosted on their own domain. That is because they might assume that such a blogger is more serious about blogging.
-If you have your own domain, you have a lot higher possibility to fully customize your blog. However, it might require some html and php knowledge. Make sure you learn some basic html before you decide to host your own blog.

I will leave you to make your own conclusions about hosting, because it really depends on circumstances. Overall, if you are really serious about blogging you may eventually decide to host your blog on your own domain.

January 7th, 2010 - Posted in About Blogging, About Internet, Websites | | 0 Comments

Linkbaiting

Linkbaiting is a strategy that some bloggers use to attract others to link to their site. There are many ways to do so, and one of them is to offer backlinks to people that will link to your site. You can learn a lot about linkbaiting by observing how others have tried to benefit from it. Here are some examples of linkbaiting strategies used by bloggers over the years:

-John Chow asked people to post a review of his site. He also promised that he will link to anyone who does so. By organizing this event he obtained a lot of backlinks. What attracted people to participate were his blog’s high Page Rank and number of readers.
-Somewhere Over the Debt was giving a free copy of a book to a person who referred most people to her site. This resulted in contestants writing posts about her site, so she obtained a lot of backlinks this way. She also emphasized her high PR.
-Make Money online with a 13-Year Old organized a link exchange program. He requested links to three of his posts with any anchor text a blogger wanted. In turn, Carl promised to link from one of his posts.

As you see, linkbaiting is all about encouraging others to link to your site. There are also many other strategies that could be used.

December 21st, 2009 - Posted in About Blogging, About Internet, Websites | | 7 Comments

Plagiarism

Have you ever noticed that somebody on the Internet copied and published your articles on his website? This happens all the time, and I am wondering how dangerous plagiarism really is. If a person copies and pastes your posts, this must mean that your posts are very high quality. Only the best blogs on the blogosphere have their posts copied and published on other sites. That is why a typical blogger does not have to worry that much about plagiarism. Even if someone publishes something that you wrote, chances are it was done by an automated script. If you send an email to a webmaster of such a site, then you probably will not get any response. That is why I would recommend to relax and do not panic if someone copies your content. After all, plagiarism is even a bigger issue in college where students copy and paste articles from the Internet. Since your career does not depend on blogging, you do not have to worry about it as much as universities.

However, plagiarism is still a big concern, and it is especially dangerous if major search engines index the plagiarist’s post before they index the post on your website. If that happens then search engines might actually assume that you are the plagiarist. That is why you should be careful so that you will not be accused of plagiarism yourself. That might be especially a problem if Google does not idnex your website very often.

November 23rd, 2009 - Posted in About Blogging, About Internet, Business Topics, Technology, Websites | | 4 Comments

New Search Engines

Choosing a search engine is a very important choice. Many Internet users use search engines on a daily basis. While most Internet users are probably using Google as their default search engine, it does not mean that there is no competition. I am not even talking about Yahoo or Microsoft’s search engines, but about relatively new ones that might become popular in the upcoming years. One of them is Cuil (pronounced Cool) and so far it looks very promising. Naturally, being cool is not its only attribute, and Cuil boasts over 120 billion indexed webpages. Some even claim that this is more than Google has indexed, however, it is hard to say whether it is true or not. In any case, the more competition there is, the better it is for users, as more competition usually means higher quality. This is especially true when it comes to the technology market, as often we do not see a lot of competition. Why is that, one might ask? I believe that is because the resources required to compete with other companies in technology market are huge. It is relatively easy to open a grocery store; however, creating a search engine from scratch which is suppose to compete with giants like Google is not easy. I hope this will change when technology will become even more widespread. Personally, I would like to see at least a few high quality search engines being created within the next few years.

November 22nd, 2009 - Posted in About Internet, Websites | | 0 Comments

Hecklers

The majority of bloggers would like to be famous, but with fame also come some problems. Many famous bloggers report that they encountered many unpleasant situations with people that we can call hecklers. Some people decide to leave rude comments, while other resort to even more drastic measures. There have been situations where other bloggers were making personal attacks on others in their own posts. Sometimes there are even the whole posts dedicated to it. Of course, people will be more willing to make attacks on popular bloggers, rather than less popular. Often the reason for these attacks is jealously. So how can we really deal with this? Those who encountered such situations recommend that you ignore any negative comments/posts. After all, why would you get involved in fruitless conversation with someone who is looking for a fight? The only time it might be a good idea to make an official response is when you were accused of very specific things that you have a clear answer to. In such a case you may want to respond; however, make sure that your arguments are based on facts and try to avoid being rude if that is possible.

November 2nd, 2009 - Posted in About Blogging, About Internet, Websites | | 0 Comments