Plagiarism is becoming an increasingly bigger problem for bloggers with each passing year. As of 2020, there are over 152 million blogs on the Internet, so this isn’t such a big surprise.
If you want your business blog to succeed, it’s vital to avoid anything that might cause you problems of this type. It can be tougher than it sounds, but fortunately, there are a couple of guidelines you should follow which can help keep your blog plagiarism-free.
1. Be Original. Quick Check With Grammarly
At the start, it can be quite tough to come up with original content that wasn’t already written somewhere, which is why many people resort to copying other well-established blogs. While it might be easier, this will doom you to failure from the beginning.
Success isn’t an overnight thing, and you have to be ready to put in the needed effort. Try writing every day, even if it’s only a couple of words. As you gain more experience, you’ll eventually find yourself typing out multiple articles per day. However, you should always put quality over quantity – people will appreciate it much more.
Before publishing a blog post, do a check-up with Grammarly. Not only will it help you find any grammar, spelling or punctuation errors you might’ve made, but it will also notify you if it detected plagiarism. Only after you’ve minimized the number of problems that it reports should you go ahead and post it.
2. Get Second Opinions
Even though Grammarly is good, it isn’t perfect. In some cases, it can detect plagiarism simply because it noticed a few words of your article which correspond to another blog post on the Web.
To avoid false positives, it’s always best to get feedback from multiple different tools. Fortunately, most of these are free. Websites such as SmallSEOTools and WorldEssays offer plagiarism checkers completely free of charge, as well as some additional tools to help you get the most out of your article. They don’t have any limitations, so use them often and apply appropriate edits if they return positive.
3. Look For Copies of Your Article
There’s nothing worse than another person making revenue from something that you’ve written. Google is your best friend – even searching for something as obvious as the title of your article might return some matches.
Besides that, try entering some phrases that you consider unique or specific to your article, and go beyond just the first page of Google search results. If you did find something, it’s time to track down the plagiarist.
Usually, these people won’t expect anyone to discover their stolen work, which is why they’ll leave personal contact info on a separate page on their website. If that’s the case, you’ve hit a goldmine. If not, you can still often find their phone number. You might think that there’s not a lot you can do in this case, but you’d be wrong.
A phone number lookup tool (there are a lot of them now) has the ability to track down and retrieve a lot of personal information by simply using this tiny piece of data. Through their numerous database connections, a reverse number lookup could cross-reference a specific phone number with social media profiles and over billions of public records.
So, you can find the identity of the plagiarist and then make a report.
4. Copyright Your Posts
If you plan on seriously investing time and effort into your business blog, you should register all your content under the DMCA. This way, anyone who tries to plagiarize and gets caught is subjected to certain legal fees.
However, this can be quite time-consuming. For an easier method, simply add your own terms and conditions at the end of each article. Be strict about them and let any potential plagiarists know that they’re going to have to deal with a lot of backlash in case they decide to follow through with their intentions.
5. Use Google Alerts
Setting up a passive way to monitor for plagiarism has never been easier with Google Alerts. When you input your wanted keywords or phrases, the tool will automatically look for their appearance on other similar websites and notify you via e-mail if it finds a correlation. It’s completely free to use and doesn’t need any frequent interaction from the user, except when they want to add new keywords.
Google’s algorithms are very good in terms of finding similar content, but you should always do a manual read-through in order to be certain that you’ve encountered a plagiarist. Afterward, you can continue taking appropriate action and either request for the content to be taken down or attributed to you.
