Copyscape: What A Nickel of An Investment Can Do For Your Writing Career

Today I want to share that .05 cents could save your writing reputation. Small price to pay, huh?

There's a valuable writing tool for web writers called Copyscape. Copyscape has a free service that looks for copies of work online and allows five searches a month but the premium service is only a nickel per search and can help you check your articles before they get posted online. You can buy a block of 100 searches for just $5 and as a self-employed individual you can write off this expense on your taxes.

Why use copyscape?

I now use it almost daily. I use it because I have a team that I sub work to and I've been let down a few times so I've become gun shy and it's important for me to protect my reputation and my business. I've now decided to use it on everything I have written for me because I got an email from a client this morning that pointed out a project done a few months back that had blocks of text that were NOT original.

Plagiarism!

The person I subbed to was an experienced writer. She has written for the web longer than I have. She came to me highly recommended. She copied several sentences of text directly into articles that were clearly defined as needing to be unique. This isn't the first time this person did this. They did it one other time and I gave the benefit of the doubt. Once bitten, twice shy.

Thankfully I have a good relationship with this long-time client and they appreciate that this has happened unintentionally and I've assured them this writer is never going to work on their projects again. I've said that anything I don't write myself for them will be run through Copyscape. I've already paid the freelance writer for the work but this weekend will have to spend several hours of my own time rewriting text for a disheartened client. I'm also going to check everything this person has done for me so I can be sure I'm not about to have any more nasty surprises.

It could have gone differently. Perhaps the client may never have told me and I could have lost a decent chunk of business. Perhaps they could've complained publicly about my business. It could have ended very badly.

Use Copyscape if you sub work out. You can use it on your own work as well and you can use it to see if anyone is trying to copy you. You may use it if you are asked to rewrite PLR articles to make sure the new content is unique. You may also use it so you can see if anyone has plagiarised you. Five cents per 2,000 words means you can use it for a few articles at a time if necessary. It just might save your reputation!

Shocked and Awed By Plagiarism

Last week I wrote about being plagiarized. Jonathan at plagiarismtoday.com suggested I set up a google alert. I've done that. The very same article was plagiarized again today. The article is posted at e-zinearticles.com so we all know those are free to use if the person who uses them attributes properly. The people who are copying these are dumb scam artists too because all they need to do is post the original author's name and leave the links intact.

I've posted on the offender's blog reminding them of the rules. The reason I keep seeing who is stealing this article is because my name is embedded in the article in a link so when anyone prints my name online, I get an alert. The scam artists are not very smart because not only are they stealing free articles but they aren't reading them to see that the original author's url is embedded in the article. It's not like it's hidden; it's pretty blatantly there!

It really makes me wish I could slip my name into everything I post online. I would probably be shocked at the number of hits. While it's wonderful to think I'm being emulated as that must mean my article is well written, this is actually starting to really tick me off.

Plagiarism Drama Update

My post the other day about the drama where someone plagiarized me has concluded. After one comment to the scum artist and two e-mails to the site admin, I got a reply this morning from "Robin" (ahem) from the blog in question at make money log dot com.

"I’m sorry to that copyright problem. Since i cann’t check the
copyrights of all articles posted by our members on this blog. I have
noticed all members to write the copyright of the articles at this
site. Also i’ll check all articles’ copyright again. Additional, I
haven’t received any notification from you a few days ago.

Please don’t worry, i have removed the article that you mentioned."

Ahem again. (unable to stop shaking head, clearing throat and smirking over here)
Again, it's really funny that this had to happen. All the person who ripped off my article had to do was keep the author box in tact when they cut & pasted me from my e-zinearticles.com article. Then, they could have kept the article and earned all the adsense dollars they wanted from it. Shrug.

Special thanks to Jonathan at plagiarismtoday.com for offering to help and for reminding me about Google alerts. I've signed up and am finding the hits pretty interesting :)

Cheers all,
Dana

Drama, Plagiarism and Disruptions

Today's drama is content theft. It's rather busy on Planet Dana and I don't have time for this but can't help but feel incensed! It's slowing me down though. I googled my name and found something that made me think that an article I wrote this week for ezinearticles.com got picked up. I looked at it and lo and behold, someone else is taking credit for it. They're not a very smart thief either because I illustrated how to make a clickable link in a blog document and used the URL of this blog as an example so ofcourse when I google Dana Prince, it turns up right away with someone else's name on it.
I've commented on the post that it's my article and yet I don't see credit and have written to the site owner as well. What else should I do? I guess wait & see what happens.

Nice to know someone thought my work was worth stealing and putting google adsense ads all over. I guess my recourse if they don't remove it is to threaten to report them to Google. Now how do I get on with my day which has to involve 8,750 words by bedtime and two busy kids in the midst. Hmmm.