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In Horseracing or Blogs, Ask for Permission

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Barbara Bush agreed; Margaret Thatcher didn’t. The point, Jake Rossen explains in the Mental Floss article titled “Hoof-Hearted; the Reason Racehorses Have Such Weird Names”, is that most governing bodies for thoroughbred racing set certain parameters for names, and when you opt to name a horse after a person in tribute to them, you have to ask permission.

Similarly, there are rules authors and blog content writers need to know about fair use and attribution. Whenever you want to directly quote, excerpt, or reproduce someone else’s work in something you are writing, you should consider whether or not you need legal permission to protect yourself and your business from potential future problems, the Vervante blog reminds us.

Vervante lists instances when you need to cite your source:

  • You’re quoting someone else.
  • You’re mentioning statistics that you didn’t collate yourself.
  • You’re using another person’s thoughts or ideas that aren’t your own.

The most common way we cite our sources (whether it be an article or a website) within our blogs is by paraphrasing and hyperlinking back to the page where the information originated (precisely what I’ve done three times in this very blog post).

Unfortunately, Jane Friedman explains, quoting or excerpting someone else’s work falls into one of the grayest areas of copyright law. There is no legal rule stipulating what quantity is OK to use without seeking permission from the owner or creator of the material. It’s fine to link to something online from your website, blog, or publication. Linking does not require permission. One guiding principle – if your use is not likely to affect the market for the original work, you’re probably OK.

“At first, it might seem odd that we should direct to other websites the users we’re always struggling to attract to our own domain,” rockcontent.com wryly comments, but “realizing the importance of referrals from other pages to the success of yours will change your mind”, the author adds.

Since the purpose of this Say It For You blog is to help content writers improve their craft, I consider linking to other websites to be my way of paying tribute to those authors’ expertise and knowledge.

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Curating Without Copying – the Mayberry Man

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“An arrogant movie star is trapped in a modern day Mayberry where he’s given a chance to discover the true meaning of friendship and family,” reads the review of the new movie Mayberry Man.

“The Mayberry Man movie nods to ‘Andy Griffith Show’ without copying,” writes Domenica Bongiovanni in the Indianapolis Star. The movie’s creator, Stark Howell, had assigned himself a tall order, the reporter points out – capturing the spirit of the original show without mirroring The movie was meant to appeal to a very targeted audience (fans of the former show and of the Mayberry festivals), and finding ways to be original was going to be the challenge.

Howell himself refers to the film as “almost a period piece without being a period piece,” noting that the message is one for post-COVID, 21st century viewers re-examining their priorities in light of the world of yesterday, where there seemed to have been more generosity along with more pie-eating contests.

From my blog content writer’s point of view, what this film’s creator has achieved is curating without copying, serving up existing material and then offering his own unique insights relative to that material.

“Curated content and duplicate content are NOT the same thing,” explains Kudani.com. “Duplicate content is frowned upon, while curated content is encouraged.” Content curation is going out on to the web, and finding high quality content, and then organizing and streamlining that content in a way that provides an additional level of value to your readers and followers.”

Needless to say, as we teach content writers a at Say It For You, the content being curated must be properly attributed to its original author. Howell hardly pretends to have created the persona of Andy Griffith; he is demonstrating to modern day viewers a way to glean wisdom from that earlier and more innocent environment.

“Remember, the internet is all about sharing,” Kudani reminds readers. I agree, I think of curation as sharing+. As a freelance blog writer, I’ve always known that linking to outside sources is a good tactic for adding breadth and depth to my blog content.  Linking to a news source or magazine article, for instance, adds credibility to the ideas I’m expressing on behalf of Say It For You client companies. What’s more, I tell owners and content writers, when you link to another blog content writer’s comments about the subject you’re covering, that’s a way to reinforce your point, at the same time showing you’re staying in touch with others in your industry.

As the Mayberry Man clearly demonstrates, curation is capturing the spirit of original content without mirroring!’’

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Do “Huh-Oh” Titles Work for Marketing Blogs?

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One important purpose of marketing blog titles is attracting online shoppers. So, catchy and engaging as a title might be, it won’t serve the purpose if the words in it don’t match up with those searchers used.

After all my “reading around” – magazines, books, blogs, textbooks – you name it, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two basic title categories: the “Huh?s” and the “Ohs”. The “Huh?s” need subtitles to make clear what the article is about; “Oh!’s” titles are self-explanatory.

“Huh?-Oh!” combo titles seem to be increasingly popular, I concluded after a recent visit to my local Barnes & Noble the other day. Here are just a few of the dozens of Huh?-Oh! titles I found on the shelves in the sections on business, psychology, and self-help:

  • Seeing Around Corners (Huh?): How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen (Oh!)
  • The Communication Clinic (Huh?) 99 Proven Cures for the Most Common Business Mistakes (Oh!)
  • Getting to Yes (Huh?) Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (Oh!)
  • When (Huh?) The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (Oh!)
  • The Storyteller’s Secret (Huh?) Why Some Ideas Catch On and Others Don’t (Oh!)

We blog content writers, of course, don’t have the luxury of using such long subtitles, as the search engines will use only a limited number of characters for ranking. Still, the beauty of the “Huh?” is that it’s a grabber, so the compromise might be to include category-based keyword phrases early in the subtitle.

The other way to “sneak” in the “Oh!” material is the meta-tag, the 160 character snippet of text that describes a page’s content. The meta tags don’t appear on the page itself, but readers can see them on the search engine page and they are scanned by search engines.

Huh? In writing engaging business blog content, it can pay to try two-tiered titles.

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Citations – Good News in Blogging, Confusing in Spelling, Bad News in Driving

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citations

“The triple whammy of homophones ‘cite’, ‘site’, and ‘sight’ has the potential to create a great deal of confusion,” the editors of The Book of Random Oddities explain. To cite, they go on to explain, means to “quote someone, or someone’s work, as a authoritative source to support an argument.” The word “cite”, the book’s authors add, is a verb derived from the Latin “citare”, which means to summon or to put into motion. (In contrast, a building sits on a site, and our vision is our sight.). Of course, the verb “cite” can also refer to issuing a court summons or parking ticket.

My college students are taught to use citations and reference pages to show where they got their information.  That way, the students avoid plagiarism by properly attributing statements to the original authors of that material. .  In your blogs, you use citation as well, giving credit to the sources of your information.  Even if you’re putting your own unique twist on the topic, link to websites from which you got some of your original information or news.

Since, as a business blog content writer, my ”arena” is the World Wide Web, I can’t help but be awed by the fact that the internet has become the largest repository of information in human history.  Trillions of words are added to it daily, and literally anyone with access to a computer or cell phone can add content to the mix at any time.

But the fact is, people read blogs to get information and we, as content providers need to provide that information with honesty and respect towards readers – and towards the original creators of any materials we use to support the points we want to make. 

Looking at citation from a whole other vantage point, author Neil Patel advises citing your own older blog posts (as I’ve done in the paragraph above). “Millions of posts are written, then seen by a few people and then essentially discarded into the blog post graveyard,” Patel laments. In fact, Patel considers old blog posts more valuable than new ones, with the majority of his traffic each month going to old posts.

Citations may be confusing, given the homonym “site” and traffic ticket terminology, but in blogging – citations represent good practice and good news!

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Bloggers and Travel Agents Bring Clarity and Curation

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Passports to world travel

“What stresses people today,” explains Matthew Upchurch, CEO of the Virtuoso luxury travel network, “isn’t the lack of information. It’s not knowing if they are asking the right questions….People don’t go to advisers for information anymore,” Upchurch adds. “They go for clarity and curation; they need someone to distill the abundance of information available to them.”

Upchurch may well have been speaking about all internet search activity, not only about travel, I couldn’t help thinking. After all, we business bloggers serve, in a very real way, as interpreters and consolidators, and curators. For that reason, I teach, effective blog posts are less information-dispensing than they are perspective-gaining tools for readers to use. You might refer to our work as offering new understandings about things readers already know.

Travelers, writes Jill Schensel in the Indianapolis Star, were “drowning in TMI (too much information.”. The life rafts for an increasing number of those travelers is once again becoming a “friendly, flesh-and-blood travel agent”.

Again, there’s a strong parallel here with blogs, which offer business owners and professional practitioners the chance to inject their own special personalities into each piece of content. One interesting perspective on the work we do as professional bloggers is that we translate clients’ corporate messages into human, people-to-people terms. In fact, that’s the reason I prefer first and second person writing in business blog posts over third person “reporting”. I think people tend to buy when they see themselves in the picture and when can they relate emotionally to the person bringing them the message.

I like to compare the interaction between blog writers and online readers to behavioral job interviews.  These don’t focus on facts, but attempt to reveal the way the prospective employee functions, discovering the person behind the resume. Just as employers want to know how reliable you’ve been in the past, your blog posts need to include stories about how you solved client problems, and what lessons you’ve learned through your experiences that you’ll be applying in your dealings with them should they choose to become your customers.

Just as Upchurch described Millenials’ renewed use of travel agents to help guide their purchases, people don’t go to websites purely for information anymore; they go for clarity and curation, and for a human touch!

 

 

 

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