The Article Writer

As of midnight tonight, 2007 is officially half way through. So my question to you is this one: are your personal goals on target or way off? To be fair, I should answer that question first so here goes:

Yes and no.

Yes, because my personal goals have been adjusted since the year began. No, because I almost always make “shift on the fly” adjustments with everything that I do.

Five Flat Months Followed By One Excellent Month

The first five months of this year fell short of expectations meaning June 2007 had to not only live up to my goals, but exceed them. In short order I was able to accomplish much this past month simply by selling off nearly all of my sites. The money generated from the sales has helped me to regroup and shift my concentration back on writing projects.

My Billy Graham Library Article

I was also able to take a few days off for family activities during this month including a very recent trip to Charlotte to visit some friends as well as to see the Billy Graham Library. I wrote about the latter and posted that article on my site.

Flex Fuel Article Published

I did a little bit of digging today and found an article I wrote that was picked up by a well known national retailer and included on Page 10 of their quarterly magazine (with my permission). I almost forgot that this article was out there.

How About You?

Are your goals for 2007 set in stone or do you make adjustments too? As mentioned, I will be taking on additional writing projects which should include press releases as well as articles for publication. With the year half way over, I want to continue to improve the way that I get business and work with clients who appreciate what I can do for them.

The DP Forums

I’ve been a member of the Digital Point webmaster forums since September 2006, finding it a decent place to interact with other web-minded folks as well as a venue for conducting business. I’ve sold links, advertised sites, and have gotten press release customers through DP. Indeed, other than Sitepoint, there isn’t any other place on the internet I prefer to visit. DP’s forum is where all of the action takes place — if you haven’t visited the site, please go ahead and see for yourself.

Your Proprietary Content — Stolen And Rewritten

I haven’t been as active on DP over the past few months as I had been initially, but I do try to stop by the forums several times each week to keep up with the latest conversations. With 31 forums and dozens of sub-forums available, DP’s scope is tremendous. However, I usually spend most of my time on the Business section to track sites being sold, domains offered, and the like.

DP has a Copywriter forum which is, in my opinion, not accurately titled. Yes, copywriting is covered, but you can also find many discussions about content writing, article writing, and so forth. A “Content Creation” sub-forum is a popular place for members to pitch their services and that is where the trouble begins.

For instance, I recently read a post where someone is offering their editing services for an extremely low price. This member states that she will edit 300 to 800 word articles and return them to the customer. Although this particular post doesn’t indicate that the “editor” will rewrite third party articles, you can find your share of people on DP who do that or customers seeking this service. Yes, some articles for rewrite are “private label” or “open source” articles, but in other cases I have learned that the origin of said article(s) is highly suspect, i.e., they are likely lifted from another site.

My Behind The Scenes Personal Battle With Stolen Content

Although I cannot point the finger at Digital Point regarding a personal, not-yet-resolved situation involving an article I wrote, I did recently learn that an “author” lifted approximately 80% of my material to produce a thinly-veiled rewrite of something I produced three years ago. In this situation, my mistake was to offer that article to an article directory — although I welcome reposting with author attribution elsewhere — this person apparently liked the article enough to take it, make some changes, and sell it.

For the record, the reputable article directories have strict guidelines forbidding plagiarism; my mistake was pushing the article out front and center where someone probably thought that the topic covered had wide appeal and was worth using for her own devices.

How To Respond To Content Theft

At this point I will not share what action I am taking against this author and the site running the lifted material. I can tell you that I have several things in play that should bring about a satisfactory response to the offense.

If you suspect that something you wrote has been stolen, then you may want to consider taking one or more steps including:

• Contacting the person who swiped your work and order them to remove it and all copies of it from the internet.
• Get a hold of the web host and inform them that they are hosting a site containing pilfered content.
• Contact Google and ask them to remove the page (or site) from their search engine. If the site is running AdSense, you could also ask Google to suspend their account.
• Learn what procedures Yahoo and MSN have for isolating sites containing plagiarized material.
• Seek compensation for monies made off of your stolen material.
• Take your case to court to claim damages.

A note to the offending party may be the only step that you need to take, especially if you clearly state that further action will be taken (as outlined) should the matter not be settled to your satisfaction.

Be Careful Whom You Hire

Content theft of any kind is absolutely wrong and should not be tolerated. Be careful about hiring anyone who claims to be able to write about virtually any subject as no one can possibly be knowledgeable enough to write intelligently about dermabrasion, hemi engines, or sub-prime mortgages without doing extensive research (and charging you $10 for a 500 word article at that). If they insist that they can, then you may end up hiring a plagiarism peddler and eventually find yourself on the receiving end of a content writer’s ire.

Believe me, we writers do regularly check to make certain that our content has been stolen.

Copyscape, anyone?

I am getting lazy as a web designer. No, I am not a designer on par with people who incorporate Flash, run ASP, use Dreamweaver or add in a bunch of other features to help make their site stand out. Instead, I prefer to keep things simple to concentrate on adding relevant content to my site. Hence, my decision to swap out a two year old stock Flash theme with a simple open source one column design developed by Contented Designs.

When I founded this site two years ago, I purchased a theme from one of those template retailers thinking I’d keep it a short while before making an update. As it turned out, other projects pressed in putting a theme change on the back burner. With my personal website portfolio being emptied out over the past few weeks, I decided to spend a few days making the change.

One thing I did not change were the inner pages. Numbering some 340 files, I decided to use the new theme for the main tabbed pages while keeping an older template in place for the internal pages. This mish mosh look is likely to be frowned upon by web pros, but I am not concerned about that — the site is easy to navigate, much more so than before.