Copying Blog Posts: Do or Don’t?
This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “Can You Copy Someone’s Blog Posts?”.
The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.
Shayla: Welcome to the Shortcut Content podcast. I’m talking with founder Dave Young. And, Dave, I want to know, is it ever okay to copy someone else’s blog posts?
Dave: Are you kidding me? Copy someone else’s blog posts? That would be a bad idea. Wouldn’t it?
Shayla: You would think.
Dave: You would think it would be and you hear all the time, Google is going to penalyze you for that. In fact, they might d-list your site, because you’re copying content and even from the ethical and moral standpoint, yeah, you’re stealing from people. Somebody went to the trouble to write those words and for you to just go in and grab them and put them on your sit and claim that they’re yours, that would be a no-no.
But, and what I’m about to suggest I don’t think violates any of those boundaries, if you have someone else in your category that is writing good content and creating ongoing blog posts and they’re knocking it out of the park every week or every month, it’s not a bad idea to go look at the topics that they’re writing about and then do your own work about the topics. Don’t take their content, but if it’s a plumbing shop and you’re a plumber, and they write a blog post called 3 Things You Should Always Do to Keep Your Drains from Clogging, well, those are three things that probably anybody should do to keep their drains from clogging, and maybe you have a fourth thing to add or maybe you only want to talk about two of them. Maybe it’s different for your customers and the place that you live.
It’s okay to take the topic. It’s okay to say, this seems like a good idea, that we should blog about this topic, because it would be helpful to our customers. Don’t go in and copy and paste their entire post- that’s a bad idea. That’s wrong on so many levels. But you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can look at what they’ve been writing about and write about the same things. And one of the cool things about how we do this in Shortcut Content is that you can actually take all of the topics that your competitor is writing about and just make a list of those topics. Don’t even read what it is that they’ve written about those topics. We do this in an audio interview. Exactly what I’m doing right now. In this case, I’m standing in front of a camera. I’ve got a microphone up here and we’re conducting this interview and there are plenty of places you can go online and find out why it’s a bad idea to plagiarize. I’m not stealing anybody’s words about that. But it is a pretty common idea that we shouldn’t steal from our competitors or from anyone for that matter. And the fact that I’m speaking this content into existence means that it’s original. I didn’t memorize this as a speech. I didn’t write this down and commit to memory and then stand in front of a camera and recite it. This is a back and forth conversation.
So that’s a really cool way of making sure that what it is that you’re writing is original content. And the content that we do at Shortcut Content is always 100% original, even if the idea came from a competitor, because the stories all come out of our customer’s mouths, and they’re always going to tell it in a unique way. And, in fact, we’ve even written before about repurposing old blog posts. You can plagiarize your own topics by going back a year, you wrote a post a year ago 3 Ways to Unclog a Drain, even if you use those exact same three ways to unclog a drain, guess what, you’re going to use different words to describe the process. And it’s going to be a different post this time. So it’s okay to take the topics and then just come at them from a different direction, or if you source your writing using audio, it’s going to be different every time anyway.
Shayla: If you have any questions about anything Dave has talked about today, again, you can find a lot of those answers at ShortcutContent.com. Otherwise, please reach out to him there. Thanks, Dave.
Dave: Thank you.