New to Blogging? What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

Hi, I know you.

You are creative and you make great stuff. You like to write, you’ve been reading lots of blogs and you have decided to start a blog to share some of your creativity, your Etsy or eBay store and photos of the baby so that the family far away can see him grow up.

The only problem is, now that the little guy is crawling and and getting into things he takes up a lot more of your attention. And you have this business to run and a blog that needs tending before all of your readers, except for your mom of course, stop coming by. There is dinner to make and laundry to do, not to mention the spider webs hanging from the light fixture. You finally sit down to put your feet up for a few precious minutes before bed only to realize that you haven’t posted on your blog AGAIN today.

So you think back to some of the fabulous posts you’ve seen in your RSS feed lately and you think that you might share a post or two from some of those bloggers you admire most. Surely they won’t mind. You grab your laptop, cruise back through your RSS feed, and before you know it you’ve bought yourself two weeks of posts. Copy, paste, schedule. Two weeks of breathing room. Yeah, they aren’t your projects, not your words, not your photos but those big bloggers with all the comments and the fancy web pages won’t mind.

Unfortunately, taking content from another persons blog or RSS feed is called “scraping” in internet lingo.

Not only will the bloggers whose material you “borrowed” get angry with you but it hurts you too. And by angry I mean the blogger (and some of her blogging friends) may call you out on it in your comments. You lose credibility because now your readers wonder if all of those great ideas you posted previously were really your ideas AND Google can make you take down your blog (or take it down for you, especially if you are on Blogger).

I know, you  didn’t know all of this. And all of this may seem a little harsh for a person who was frazzled and out of time but there are also professional outfits out there using software to scrap content from RSS feeds and they do it to make lots of money. Money from someone else’s hard work. It’s become a growing problem and bloggers are taking a stand.

So do yourself a favor and be sure to post only your own original content. Most bloggers don’t mind if you share ONE photo from a project you like and then link out to their blog for the full post.  Just a photo and a sentence or two about why you like the project or why you like that particular blogger with a link out to the post you are referring to (not to the front page of the site) will give you a little content in a way that makes everyone happy.

How do you know if your blog has been scraped or what to do about it? You might find this article on wpbeginner  helpful.

 By: Vicki O’Dell , The Creative Goddess