Sunday 31 January 2016

7 Missed Social Media Lead Generation Opportunities

4600581394 dc57b57e3d m resized 600Lets take a look at opportunities that many marketers are missing in the battle for online lead generation. Many of these issues stem from not including calls to action (CTAs) alongside valuable and relevant content that is being shared on social media. 

7 Missed Social Media Lead Generation Opportunities

1. No Blog CTA - Business blogs are great, because they are a social media asset that a company owns and completely controls. Businesses that blog get 55% more website traffic than those that don’t . However, it doesn’t help your business if those new visitors remain anonymous. Many businesses forget to include CTAs on their blog, preventing traffic from turning into leads. At HubSpot , we have found that putting CTAs at the end of blog posts works well to increase lead generation. 

2. No Referral Process - If you are sending social media followers to interesting blog content with CTAs, then some of them will become leads for your business. The next problem to solve is getting more followers so that you can continue to grow your flow of new leads. It is important to have some type of process that encourages people to follow your business on social media and recommend others to follow your business. This process could be a contest on Twitter or Facebook or could be as simple as occasionally asking your followers to recommend to others in their online community to follow your business. 

3. Having a Facebook Page Without A Landing Page - The fewer clicks needed for someone to become a lead for your business, the better. One way to reduce this friction is to integrate lead capture forms into social media platforms where possible. You can add an offer and landing page as part of your Facebook page. If you are a HubSpot customer or trial user, you can now do this very easily 

4. Missing Social Media Bio Opportunities - Often the first pieces of content a potential new follower or lead sees on the social Web is your profile information. On Twitter, for example, the profile information for your account is in the sidebar of your page. There, most businesses simply put in the link to their home page. However, it is a better option to send them to a custom page only for Twitter users that features special content as well as a relevant offer to people who may follow you on Twitter.
5. Missing Social Signature Links - Signatures matter whether they are in your email, a blog comment or on a site like LinkedIn. Forgetting to include a signature with a link is a major mistake. When selecting the link to go into your signature, make sure you pick a relevant resource that also has potential to convert some visitors into leads for your business. 

6. Boring Content - You can have the most amazing CTA and lead generation offer in the world, but if it is surround by boring content, no one will ever see it. If your content is boring and talks only about your product, it won’t attract any attention through social media or any other channel, for that matter. So focus on creating content that is about your industry and the problems that your customers are trying to solve. 

7. Too Many Clicks - Don't make people work hard. In the case of social media lead generation, working too hard means making people click too many times to find the information they want. Going from anonymous Web visitor to a lead could also involve a lot of work. Examine your lead generation paths throughout your social media tactics and make sure that you have reduced friction as much as possible. 

Great social media marketing is about combing awesome and relevant content with voluntary opportunities for prospects to get closer to your business, whether that'd mean becoming a follower, subscriber or a lead. 

What other missed opportunities would you add to this list?

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How The Search Engines Rank Content in the Search Results

As users have shifted to mobile devices, the limited screen size of the devices have pushed search engines to squeeze out & displace publishers with their own self-hosted information in an effort to offset the poor usability offered by tiny devices, while ensuring the search habit does not decline.
The philosophy of modern search has thus moved away from starting with information and connecting it to an audience, to starting with the user and customizing the result page to them.
"The biggest three challenges for us still will be mobile, mobile, mobile" - Google's Amit Singhal
How Search Works in 2016.
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Saturday 30 January 2016

5 Ways to Make Your Blog Content More Clickable on Twitter

It’s not easy to get heard these days on Twitter. It’s never been more difficult to cut through the noise, attract someone’s attention, and then get them to click through to your content.
Screen Shot 2016-01-25 at 1.32.36 PM
According to Sign-Up To, the average CTR on Twitter is 1.64%, and the more followers you have, the less likely it is that they will click through to your content.
So what can you do to bump this number up and make an impact on your website’s traffic? Let’s take a look.

Pay Attention to Your CTA’s

A CTA, or Call-to-Action, tells your audience exactly what you want them to do. CTA’s are crucial for click-through, as well as engagement.
As you can see below in this research by Dan Zarella, CTA’s that target the Retweet action are extremely effective. Tailoring your Retweets for your desired outcome, like clicks, is crucial to improving your CTR.

Include Photos, GIFs, and Memes

This might seem like a no-brainer, but the impact of visuals on CTR is huge.big tom hanks fao schwarz movie 80s movies
See what I did there? Tweets with images receive 18% more clickthroughs, 89% more favorites, and 150% more Retweets than Tweets without.

Optimize Your Link Preview Images

If you don’t choose to include a visual in your Tweet, make sure your link preview image is optimized for Twitter. The design, sizing, and copy on these images is extremely important and can be a deciding factor as to whether someone clicks through or not.

 Follow
Digiday @Digiday
At Forbes, traffic from LinkedIn jumped 127% between July and December last year. http://trib.al/pXaH6d6 
Photo published for LinkedIn is once again driving big traffic to publishers - Digiday

LinkedIn is once again driving big traffic to publishers - Digiday

By Ricardo Bilton @rbilton
When it comes to traffic, LinkedIn giveth, LinkedIn taketh away and LinkedIn giveth back.
View on web

Find the Right Time to Drive Traffic

Take a good, long, hard look at your top time to Tweet. How do visits by hour correlate with your number of Tweets sent?

Screen-Shot-2014-06-18-at-2.14.01-PM
Find your top time to Tweet for traffic and double down.

Use Hashtags for More CTR

Don’t sleep on those hashtags! According to Buffer, including a hashtag or two could result in 2x more engagement.
But you have to keep it under control now, people. The sweet spot for hashtag usage is between one and two hashtags — crossing into the 3 or more threshold will result in less of an engagement increase. 
Screen-Shot-2014-04-06-at-6.45.50-AM
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How Pairing Personalization & Automation Can Skyrocket Email Conversions

Email inboxes are noisy–and are even more competitive than you might think. The average email user has an inbox made up of about 50% newsletters and 20% social network updates according to Microsoft.
So when a you’re working to stand out from the raucous crowd that’s competing for a user’s attention within the inbox environment, it’s no longer enough to send one-size-fits-all email messages—you need the one-two punch of sending the right personalized message at the right time.
That means harnessing the power of two different features within email: Personalization and automation. Here are some practical tips for getting started.

Personalizing Email Messages

Many businesses and organizations have fallen into the habit of sending mass emails that don’t utilize personalization (like including the recipient’s first name in the subject line.)
But Experian recently reported that implementing this minor change had a dramatic effect on open rates:
experian-report-open-rates

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Across almost every industry studied, including the recipient’s name in the email subject line increased open rates–some by as much as 42%. Other research echoed the success of using a recipient’s first name in the subject line, reporting that emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.
The shocking part is that researchers also found only 35% of marketers are leveraging personalized subject lines.
So, what gives? Is personalizing a subject line confusing? It’s actually pretty simple. As long as you’ve collected a first name from those who opt-in to your email list, personalization takes seconds. Most email providers (like Campaign Monitor,MailChimpAWeber, etc.) enable you to insert a recipient’s first name by inserting a custom field into the subject line.
For example: If you were using Campaign Monitor and wanted to personalize your subject line, you’d use [firstname, fallback=] as pictured below:
campaign-monitor-subject-line-personalization
And that’s it. With this simple step, every email recipient will see his/her name appear within the subject line, like in this example from Ipsy:
subject-line-personalization
You can also use this same format to include the recipient’s first name within the message body, which ups the personalization just a little bit more, as seen in this email from Poshmark:
poshmark-email
By simply enabling an existing feature on your email platform, you can boost open rates–which is the first step toward increased conversions.

Personalization via Segmentation

The realm of email personalization extends beyond the subject line, too. Aside from having a human element, personalized messages are also highly relevant for recipients–which is a major pain point for about three-fourths of email account owners. Research shows that as many as 74% of online consumers are frustrated by messages that aren’t relevant and don’t fit their interests, which can happen as a side effect of unsegmented email lists that help categorize subscribers.
Along with relevancy, segmented lists also have a slew of other positive effects for email marketing. The DMA reported that segmented at targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue, and that some markets have noted a 760% increase in revenue from segmented campaigns.
And then there’s data from the Lyris Annual Email Optimizer Report:
email-segmentation-results
The report shows that segmentation also helps boost open rates, drives conversions, and overall increases the quality of communication–making for successful emails that feel tailor-made for each unique recipient.
So how do you go about segmenting your lists?

Step 1: Make a Plan for Segmentation

Every business has different objectives for their email marketing campaigns, but think about the ways in which you currently use email messaging, and how you’d ideally like to use it in the future. From here, you can start to break down a mass list into smaller, more relevant lists and map out your plan for segmentation.
Think about sorting contacts by:
  • Demographics (gender, age, job title, geographic location)
  • Purchase type (specific product categories)
  • General interests (user-indicated topical interests, like special events)
These are just a few ideas to get your mental wheels turning, but think about how you can break down an existing list into more specific categories. Moving forward, you can then enable user-selected sorting capabilities (like the ability to opt-in to different segments of your list for specific types of communication.)
Need more inspiration? See how BuzzFeed uses email segmentation.

Step 2: Build Segments

Next, it’s time to start segmenting your list within your email platform. Some email platforms (again, we’ll use Campaign Monitor as an example) will allow you to build segments based on rules and parameters you set.
Here’s what it looks like to build different segments on their platform:
segments-in-email

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In the example, you can see how you could build out a specific segment that includes managers in New York via parameters that require the title of Manager or Assistant Manage who reside/work in New York.
You can create as few or as many different segments as you like, but each new segment should have a conversion-oriented purpose.
Note: If you want to create detailed segments, you’ll need to collect more detailed information from subscribers during opt-in. Add a few extra fields (like job title, address, etc.) that go beyond name and email address to get the data you need in order to properly segment.

Step 3: Send Accordingly

Once you’ve created your various segments, you can begin launching more specific email campaigns that align with the interests of your various lists.
Here’s an example of what that might look like: Imagine you own a retail business that specializes in outdoor sporting equipment. Rather than sending one-size-fits all emails that promote all of your products to a single list, you create segments based around promoting specific types of equipment (like fishing gear, baseball equipment, etc.)
general-email-list-versus
Through website opt-ins and online purchase tracking, you can now send highly relevant information about your specific products to people who’ve are most likely to be interested in that information.
Now that you know how to leverage personalization and segmentation to send the right message to the right email subscribers, let’s look at how you can use automation to send those messages at exactly the right times.

Automating Email Messages

Automated emails enable you to communicate with the right person with the right message at the right time (without having to keep track of each subscriber one by one.)
And they’re proven to be successful tools for boosting conversions, too. Experian research found that automated transactional emails have 8x more opens and clicks than any other type of email–and they can generate 6x more revenue. And along with the pure convenience factor it offers, email automation is proven to drive conversion rates by as much as 50% for B2C marketers.
Because of this, more and more companies are hopping on board with automation: it’s used by 82% of B2B and B2C companies, and revenue for marketing automation systems increased by 60% in 2014.
So how can you use email automation?
Many email marketing platforms already have automation features built in (although more often than not, they’re a paid feature.)
Automated emails can:
  1. Act as workflows that auto-send on a schedule (like after a customer makes a purchase)
  2. Auto-send when certain actions have been completed by a user or at a designated point in time (like when a user hasn’t made a purchase in 30 days)
  3. Act as an onboarding series (for use with new customers or new team members)
You can have multiple workflows running at the same time, so think about what different objectives you can accomplish within different series.

How to Set Up Email Automation

You can set up email automation for a variety of purposes, but let’s look at what it would look like using MailChimp:
mailchimp-email-workflow

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Step 1: Choose Your Trigger

Using MailChimp, you can set up a workflow that triggers based on an action you select. In this example, the workflow is triggered when someone subscribes to a specific email list, but other triggers might be:
  • When a customer celebrates his/her one-year anniversary of a subscription service
  • When a purchase is made
  • When a customer hasn’t visited the website within X days
From there, you’ll launch an email sequence that drives the recipient through a series of emails that all work together toward a conversion (like an item purchase.)

Step 2: Create Your Email Workflow

Next, put together a series of 3-8 (or more, if you want) that keep the conversation with your subscriber going. In the example, you’ll see that in the example, they’ve created:
  • A welcome email
  • A new signup discount email
  • A getting started email
All of these messages help you stay in touch with the customer while encouraging them to take further action or to re-engage with you.
In your workflow, you can do things like:
  • Showcase other offerings your business has
  • Offer a discount or coupon code to encourage repeat purchases
  • Highlight helpful resources, like how-tos or interesting blog content
  • Leverage visual assets, like a lookbook or video
The goal of these on-going message series is for you to keep reminding your customer of the value you can provide and to keep your brand top-of-mind–so think about what you need to say to accomplish that.
Need more on this part? Read more on outbound email automation tactics here.

Step 3: Schedule Your Timing

Once your email series is ready, you’ll want to map out when these messages will send, and which recipients will receive them. Space out your messages so that they are not overwhelming, but on a timetable that maintains relevancy.
mailchimp-scheduling-segmentation

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In the example, you’ll see how MailChimp lets you determine when automated messages will send and which segments will receive messages. You’ll want to test different send times to see which pattern is most effective for your audience.

Step 4: Don’t Forget Transactional Emails

Emails that send automatically after a customer completes an action are also part of your automated email strategy–so make sure you are optimizing them with clever copy and smart design. Studies show that messages about order confirmation and shipping confirmation have some of the highest open rates of all.
transactional-emails-data

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Many of these types of messages only include a standard message with order details, but with such high open rates, you should put these automated messages to work, too.
One of the beloved examples of a solid transactional email is this shipping confirmation email from CDBaby, which says:
cd-baby-shipping-confirmation-email

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See how fun that is? Rather than just saying, “Thanks for your order” this email puts an interesting, lovable spin on what might be an otherwise boring message. Write copy that makes your message memorable for readers.

Step 5: Watch Conversion Rates Soar

Once your workflows go live, keep an eye on metrics like open rate and click-through rate to see how effective your automated campaigns are–and monitor how your conversion rate improves.
Just remember: Automation doesn’t mean set-it-and-forget it. You need to constantly make tweaks and improve based on subscriber feedback and A/B testing–just like with any other email you’d send.

Tools for Execution

The final question in this equation, then, is: What email platforms can I use to harness the power of both personalization and automation? Here’s a brief summary of a few options–but there are many, many more you can look into as well.
Campaign Monitor
This platform has a whole gallery of mobile-friendly templates you can customize, as well as lots of helpful resources for all aspects of email marketing. Thanks to built-in metrics and multiple integrations, you can study campaign success and make email marketing a seamless part of your operation.
Price: $9-49/month
Hubspot
Hubspot offers a full-service solution for marketers with everything from email, to CRM, to social media management, and more. If you’re looking for a one-stop-shop for all of your online marketing efforts, this is powerful option with a training system built right in.
Price: $200-2,400/month
MailChimp
Using MailChimp, you can take full advantage of a variety of different email tools, like A/B testing, automation, and more. Create custom templates or use their free options to build and send customized emails. Here you’ll find lots of teaching resources, helpful integrations, mobile-friendly designs, and advanced metrics for studying the success of your campaigns.
Price: $25 and up, based on number of subscribers
AWeber
AWeber prides itself on its integration with other apps, its suite of advanced tools, and self-hosted opt-in forms. Again, tons of free guides to help you get started and webinars that enable you to get the most out of this platform.
Price: $19 and up, based on number of subscribers
Constant Contact
One of the long-standing figures in the email marketing industry, this platform touts ease of use. Here, you can take advantage of templates, learn how to improve email marketing efforts, and get access to 24/7 support.
Price: $20 and up, based on number of subscribers
Again, these five options are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to your options for sending email, so look around and see which interface and tools best fit your needs. The bottom line is that you need to find an email marketing service that works with your budget and covers all of your needs for both personalization and automation.

Personalization + Automation = More Conversions

The numbers don’t lie–a combination of personalized email marketing and automated messaging are a surefire way for you to increase the success of your campaigns. Follow the steps for personalizing email, segment your lists, and put automated and triggered emails to work for your business.
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Friday 29 January 2016

Why Pinterest Matters (Infographic)

Most e-commerce brands are still trying to figure out the magic recipe for web conversions and brand awareness on social media. Pinterest makes it easy, constantly innovating with features like visual search and helping brands big and small slim the gap between product awareness and purchase point with buyable pins. 
As Pinterest continues to roll out features to help brands optimize engagement, web traffic, and purchases, it should be no mystery why your brand should grow its presence on the platform — but if you’re still wondering, check out the infographic below, care of our friends over at WebpageFX. 
why-pinterest-matters-infographic
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The Top 5 Video Websites And Why They Are Important For Your Business









It is imperative that businesses put themselves out there and engage with the consumer in order to drive success. Video production is an ever-increasing method by which businesses are marketing themselves in a new and fresh way. A study by Cisco predicted that video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic by 2017.
Video is naturally engaging and easy to digest and it could drive huge amounts of traffic to your site and create more business. Video has the potential to set you apart from competitors if it is done well, which is normally achieved through going to a professional advertising or marketing agency.
Video marketing can add a new element to your online and social presence, and using any of the following video websites could help you increase traffic to your site or simply boost brand awareness.
1. YouTube
YouTube is probably the most obvious choice when it comes to videos. With YouTube videos appearing more and more in Google searches, you can even improve your business’ search ranking through video marketing. YouTube has around 1 billion visitors a month, opening up endless possibilities when it comes to growing your audience and reaching your target market.
YouTube is the third most visited website worldwide, after Google and Facebook and brings in a weekly audience of more than 20 million people in the UK alone, therefore creating a huge platform for you to incorporate into your marketing strategy. A creative ad agency would help you implement this.
2. Vimeo
Vimeo is a video platform constantly increasing in popularity and has gained itself a reputation for high quality used by creative professionals. You may often see artists releasing new videos and other content through Vimeo, which has given the video site a credible background.
Vimeo offers a smaller and more niche community for more professional creatives. Its smaller audience can result in more engaged viewers. It has a clean layout, making the video the focus and nothing else.
3. Wistia
Wistia gives you the option to have full control over the branding of your videos and enables you to add sharing buttons and a clickable call to action. Wistia has an analytic package that includes a heatmap for every view; this shows exactly which parts of the video were watched, skipped or re-watched.
Wistia is a relatively new platform but its SEO features make it a great platform for your business.
4. Sprout
Sprout offers business video hosting solutions that provides a full analytics service and you can add call to action to capture valuable leads. You can also easily add an email collection form to build your contact list from your video marketing. This along with the ability to customise your playlists and videos makes Sprout a brilliant platform to start utilising video content. You can also customise the appearance of your video every time you embed it and there are a whole host of security settings.
5. Vine
Despite being an app, Vine is an important platform to consider. With social media becoming more and more important for business, Vine is a video app that allows you to create 6 second videos and share through your social media accounts. Targeting a younger and media-savvy audience, your business can use Vine to create eye-catching clips to help promote your brand.
It can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to video hosting but with a leading creative agency in video production and branding such as Creative Spark with its range of services, you could have a wealth of help by your side as you branch out into video production as a way of content marketing. Creative Spark offer a huge array of avenues to get into branding and advertising, whether it is through digital, print or video. If you are serious about using the advantages of these video hosting sites it may be worth looking to an advertising agency to help you get the most out of it!
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How to Use Content That Isn’t Yours

how-to-use-content-not-yours-cover
The Oatmeal’s creator Matthew Inman posted a comic comparing having a baby to having a cat. For those who eschewed procreation in favor of raising felines, the comic is a (hilarious) validation. It also rings true for parents who have gone the baby route. The web-based comic went viral, racking up over 300,000 shares on Facebook alone.
That massive traffic proved all too alluring, and a blogger at the Huffington Post reposted the entire comic in the body of an article. Understandably peeved that another corporate entity was profiting from his hard work, Inman switched the image connected to the link, with this message:
Image-switch-Huffington-Post
While there was a predictable amount of schadenfreude expressed by competing media outlets, the incident highlighted a complicated challenge that publishers – traditional media companies or brands engaged in content marketing – face when developing policies on how to use other people’s content.
While there’s no straightforward rule book to consult for those who want to engage in ethical content creation or to incorporate other people’s content into their own content marketing, here are a few approaches you might try.

Keep it 100% legal

In a nutshell, any original image, writing, or recording in a fixed medium (written down or saved as a file) is protected by copyright law. So if you take a photo with your digital camera, you have the rights to that photo immediately. Similarly, when you hit save on a Word doc, you have a copyright to that content. The only notable exceptions are when you create something for work (your employer would own it), or when you use something that already has copyright protection as the basis for your work. That means that your Harry Potter fan fiction, a company blog post, or a Beyonce mash-up you mix probably wouldn’t belong to you.
The same principle applies to brands: Any original content their employees create belongs to the brand.
If you want to use someone else’s content, you should ensure that you:
  • Obtain written permission: Enter a formal agreement with the creator or through the terms of service on a user-generated content site. For example, you can embed YouTube videos wherever you like because all YouTube posters have agreed to its terms of service (including embedding videos by others).
  • Engage in fair use: You’re allowed to copy work to criticize, comment, or parody. When you pull a block quote from Joe Pulizzi’s latest blog post to talk about how brilliant he is, there’s nothing he can do to stop you. But if you copy his entire post, you’re in trouble. Similarly, taking a screen-grab from a movie to create a meme is likely OK.
A good question to determine whether fair use applies: Would your use of the content in any way subtract from the value that would otherwise go to the content creator? If the answer is no, then you should be in the clear to use it.
If you want more detail, here’s a good copyright law overview.

Get an informal OK

Getting written permission is ideal, but you’ll still be on ethical high ground if you ask the creator if you can use the content and you get a less formal “yes” – send a quick email, tweet, or LinkedIn ping.
Permission-to-use-photo
See? In this tweet exchange, a local TV station asks a person who uploaded his photo of a plane fire. When you reach out, promise to include attribution and a link back to the person’s website to sweeten the deal (and give the much-deserved credit.)

Don’t ask, but do provide credit and links

Always try your best to track down the original host of the content and credit it by linking to it. Many consider links to be a form of currency that provide real value to the content creator in the form of SEO and exposure.
In fact, a lot of content creators are in it just for the exposure; they’ll probably be thrilled you used their image, video, or writing – as long as it’s clear that they’re the brilliant mind behind it. By giving good attribution alone you’re not necessarily in the right legally, but you’re probably still in the right.
Follow these two best practices:
  • Find the original source: In this age of syndicated content, aggregation, and sharing, it can be pretty easy to give credit to the wrong person or build a link to the wrong site. To give credit where it’s due, follow the trail of attribution back to the hosting source. And if you want to be an ethical superstar, copy two sentences from a written piece into your Google search bar (or use a reverse image search for photos, infographics, etc.) to locate the true source. As an example, this phrase pops up several places, but credit should go to the CMI site:
  • Find-the-original-source
  • Use embed features. Many major social platforms offer codes that allow you to easily embed their content onto your own website. YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook all provide this function. Be sure to read each social platform’s embed policies and terms of service but, generally speaking, content embedded on social sites such as Twitter is often legal to publish as long as you use the platform’s embed code. If you download and republish the asset, you lose the legal authority to have it on your site and make it harder for people to find their way back to the original.

Subscribe to stock-image platforms

If you need an accompanying image for a blog post, in many cases a royalty-free image or illustration will suffice. It’s important to note though that royalty free does not mean that the image is free to use. Royalty-free images have a license fee but you are not required to pay a royalty each time you use the image.
Be sure to read the restrictions outlined in the image provider’s license, which may limit the frequency of an image’s use or preclude its use for commercial purposes. On Shutterstock, for example, you need to identify the expected reach of the image, which determines the fee or image package available.

Use Creative Commons content

Millions of artists and content creators are uploading their work onto the web under a Creative Commons license, which is a more permissive form of copyright. (Creative Commonsis a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creative content and knowledge through free legal tools. It was popularized by artists who thought their work should be shared.)
You can search for Creative Commons photos on Flickr, for example. Remember – just because a work is listed as Creative Commons doesn’t mean credit isn’t required or restrictions don’t exist. (Most Creative Commons licenses require you to seek permission if you want to use the content for commercial reasons.)

Honor takedown requests

There may be a time when a content creator doesn’t want you to use his content. Take the example I shared at the beginning. Huffington Post credited The Oatmeal for the use of its comic and it used the image file from The Oatmeal site, but it resulted in so many server calls that The Oatmeal wanted it taken down. The Huffington Post eventually apologized for the error, removed the image from the post, and replaced it with a link to The Oatmeal’s website.
Bottom line: If you don’t have legal permission, don’t argue with the creator when he or she comes a-callin’. It creates bad blood and gives the creator ammunition that can be used in court. Apologize and offer to take down the content immediately. If you respond promptly, the owner of that content usually will be understanding and take no further action.

Protect your original content

Since you’re a content creator, too, you may be on the other side of these issues. Want to check on the use of your original content by others? Google and Google image search are the best place to start (though not really scalable if you want to keep tabs on a lot of content). There are a bunch of other tools, including Copyscape, which is a great plagiarism and stolen copy checker.
If you want to get someone to cease, desist, or just give you credit for your original content, here’s a good guide to responding to plagiarism.

Conclusion

Would it be much easier if you could view any content that floats across your screen as fair game for re-posting? Sure, but that approach hurts both content creator and replicator. If we accept the premise that quality content contains value, then we must recognize that value by being respectful to those who produced it.
Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
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