Make money from blogs - What does fair use actually mean ?

Fair use is one of the most debated terms in copyright / content issues. At a very non-legal level, fair use means that a person is allowed to refer to a section of somebody else's content as long as it is meant for purposes of reviews or as part of creating new content. There are limitations in this though, since even for fair use, you cannot copy the main idea or use something that is published very minimally, and other restrictions. To learn more about what fair use means, refer to this blog (link to article):

So, let’s start with a fairly common sense definition (and since I am not a lawyer, you should take anything said in this article as common sense, not legal advice). Fair use is meant for the case when somebody wants to use your work to do a review, praise or criticize. That is allowed and perfectly legal, but what is not allowed is to copy the main few concepts from your content and use that under the guise of fair use. When somebody uses a small section of your content, they are actually using your content to create new content, not creating a copy of your content.

Make money from blogs - Using CreativeCommons to protect your work

If you post content on the internet, then people will find ways to get to this content. They can get your content using your RSS feed, or directly copy from your site, and there are very few tools that can actually stop a dedicated thief from stealing your content. However, for the other people who copy your content in the belief that content available on the internet is free, and can be copied without any problems, a brief insertion of legal terms and a copyright notice can be enough to scare them. Read more information on this in a post (link to article):

You can put a small copyright policy on your blog such that it stops people from copying your content, and one easy way of doing that is through a site called http://creativecommons.org/. On this site, you can setup a copyright policy by asking a few questions, and you get a small HTML cope that you include in the template on your site. If you go to the specific site called http://creativecommons.org/choose/, you can specify whether you want your content to be copied to be used for commercial purposes, or even prevent modification of your work.

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Make money from blogs - You find a site that copies your site, and want to take legal action

Suppose you come across a site that has copied your content, and you value content enough that you would like to get the other site to remove such content. The owner of the other site has not heeded your complaints, and you want to take the next step of requesting the hosting companies as well as search engines to remove the stealing site using the legal avenue of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). This post (link to article) details the items you should make sure you do before you proceed on this path;

1. You should realize that proceedings under this could take some time to come to a result
2. There are not too many precedents under this law
3. You will certainly need a lawyer to help guide you through
contd..

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Make money from blogs - Migrating from a blog hosted on Blogger to your own domain

It's a common occurrence; people start out with a blog that runs on a free service such as Blogger or Wordpress.com, and then over a time develop a readership and a Good Page Rank. At some point during this process, the person running the blog realizes that maybe it was a mistake starting the blog on a shared domain (or a free service). It does not look professional, there are limitations on what you can do and the services you can launch, but you are stuck. Moving onto a new domain will mean that you lose your existing readers, you lose your Google Page Rank (and if you have a Page Rank that is greater than 4, there is no greater fear of a blogger than having to lose that Page Rank).
An easy solution could be to put a link on top to the new domain, but that really does not work. The Page Rank is not tranferred, and the readership does drop. So, what is required is a way that the blog can be moved over to your own private domain (hosted on some common hosting company), without losing these items. I was reading a post (link to this post)

But this year, I tried a little different approach and it worked – now Digital Inspiration is located at www.labnol.org and there’s no dip in search rankings, organic site traffic and the RSS subscriber count. Here’s that very secret recipe explained in 10 easy steps:

The author does not have complete success, in the sense that the Blogger / Blogspot blog still generates more visits than the Wordpress blog, but it is getting closer, and there are many seeming advantages to having a Wordpress account. Read the linked post, and see whether you want to go down that path.

Make money from Blogs - Stop Plagiarism: Using JavaScript to prevent your content from being copied

Let me start out right away by stating that I really don't prefer using a method such as JavaScript to prevent my content from being copied. Why not ? After all, it is a pretty simple way to prevent people from getting at my content and copying it. And it is fairly simple to go onto the internet and find a large number of free Javascript snippets that will disable people from being to right-click inside your blogs, and hence not able to copy the content.
Well, here are some problems with this approach.
1. It will stop only novice users. People who have RSS in the case of blogs that provide a complete RSS feed will get the entire content already.
2. Also, when an internet page gets loaded onto a browser, it is already sitting on the user machine, and can be copied from the cache.
3. It can create resentment pretty fast. For somebody wanting to just take a small section of your blog and use it as fair use, or for sending in an email, or even for attribution, it can get annoying.
4. It does not work on all browsers, and if Javascript is turned off, there goes the support.
5. If there is a browser where the Javascript rendering engine is faulty, it can cause some vague errors that the reader will have no idea as to what this means.

In short, use it if you feel that a rudimentary protection scheme is useful, but understand that it will irritate some users, and for the serious copier, it will not be a block.

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Make money from blogs - Detecting plagiarism of your blogs - Use the Copy Tracker service (free)

In the last few posts, I have been concentrating on figuring out some of the tools you can use to stop plagiarism of your precious posts. After all, when you have written some great stuff, the last thing you would want is for somebody to copy your content without letting you know, and then posting it as their own. And if this site is a site that comes in search engines before your blog does, then you also end up losing traffic when somebody searches for that context. That will certainly pain you; however, it is not very easy to stop somebody from copying your content; what you should be focusing on is how to detect when somebody has copied your content.
There are many tools that you can use for this process, including the simplest available option of searching for a somewhat unique term from your post in Google search, or configuring Google Alerts for finding content very similar to yours. In addition, there are other tools that also help you find content that has been copied from your blog, and posted on another blog. One such free online tool is called CopyScape (link to site).
The usage is simple, just enter the URL related to the blog which you suspect has been copied, and the tool will find searches.
Once you find such blogs elsewhere on the net which seem to have copied your content, you can take the various actions that you would take in order to get the offending sites to remove your content.

Make money from blogs - Great article on copyright steps you should take

For the last several posts, I have been focusing on how to prevent copyright theft (essentially when somebody either manually or automatically copies your content and then posts it on their blog). It is something that is not pleasant to watch. I had this happen to me a couple of times:

- Once when I discovered that another site was copying my content totally (an email to a couple of email addresses such as admin@, webmaster@, and so on managed to stop this copying without an actual response from the other side.
- Another time I had an email from another site owner where he wanted permission to take my content. It was polite, but when I looked at the other site, it had copied content from many sites with just a credit at the end. I suggested that the other person could just copy a paragraph, but I did not get any response after that. That ended that particular discussion.

I realized that I needed to do more research in this area, and came up with this article (link to article) that enumerates some steps that one should take. The site recommends steps such as adding a copyright notice in your blog, add a section about how to license your content, and then use tools such as third party tools, and others such as Google Alerts to actually detect whether your content is being used elsewhere.
The first few steps will not stop anyone from actually using your content, but to a person with even a certain amount of ethics, it will cause them to pause and reflect.

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Make money from blogs - AntiLeech Wordpress Plugin: How to protect your RSS feed from getting copied automatically

For bloggers, a RSS feed is something critically important. With a RSS feed, you can build a set of dedicated readers who get pinged everytime you generate new content, as well as be able to control how much of your post you want them to see. If users are impressed with what they read, they will come to your blog more often to read other content on the blog, and spread the word around. So, having a RSS feed is critical. At the same time, a RSS feed is also a very useful tool in the hands of somebody who wants to make a simple automated system of copying your feed. Such a person will have a website build of content from many similar blogs, and automatically generate content from these different feeds. And since Google does not index RSS feeds, this other site will use a mechanism to take this feed and create a post on the other site. Of course, you hate this, but what can you do, short of stopping your RSS feed. Or you can take the effort to try and identify this person from your RSS feed and block, but it is no easy matter.
Another option is to use a Wordpress Plugin to try and give a different content to such an automated system (called a splog, a blog build from feed spammers who automatically take content from feeds and convert them into content on another blog, hence stealing your content). One way to reduce or prevent such stealing is through using a Wordpress Plugin called AntiLeech Wordpress Plugin (site). What does this Plugin do ?
From the site:

AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site (and mine, too, ok?) and sends it only to them. When they steal this content, it appears online just like normal, except now you've turned the tables on them and have provided them with useless content.
AntiLeech can detect a splogger bot using its User-Agent string (an identifier that some bots send when they are collecting data), or by IP address. You can enter a User-Agent or an IP address into the Options panel of your WordPress blog. When a visitor with a qualifying (any checked option on the options page) User-Agent or IP address visites your site, they will see only the generated content.

Read more about this plugin from other blogs at Google Search (link)

Use Google Alerts to detect if somebody is copying your Blog

It is not uncommon to find somebody copying your content, and the hard fact to accept is that you may not be able to do anything about it. The internet makes it so very easy to find and copy content that you may be fighting a losing battle in trying to prevent people from copying your content. As an example, a RSS feed provides your content (partial or full) to anybody who can receive this RSS field, and even if you were not providing access to a RSS field on your blog, there are many other ways to get RSS updated content from another blog or site.
The recommended process is to find who all is copying from your content, and then try and get that content removed from all those sites where it is being copied (by corresponding with the site owner, or through a complaint to their host, or to Google Adsense if the other site is running Adsense). The question is, how do you detect whether somebody is copying your content ? There are many tools available (commercial or free) available for this purpose - Google Alerts is one of these tools that can be configured to send you a periodic report (link to Google Alerts site).
What are Google Alerts ? Learn more at the FAQ (link)
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Google Alerts are emails automatically sent to you when there are new Google results for your search terms. You can also choose to have your alerts delivered via feed to the feedreader of your choice (e.g., Google Reader or add the feed to your iGoogle page).
What is the maximum number of alerts I can create?
You can create up to 1000 alerts. To create more alerts, you can either delete any existing alerts or request alerts to be sent to a different email address. Please remember that you can only have up to 10 unverified Alerts at any given time.

What are the different types of alerts I can sign up for?
Google Alerts currently offers 6 variations of alerts - 'News', 'Web', 'Blogs', 'Comprehensive', 'Video' and 'Groups'.
A 'News' alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.
A 'Web' alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.
A 'Blogs' alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.
A 'Comprehensive' alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.
A 'Video' alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.
A 'Groups' alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

So, define one string that you believe is getting copied, and update that into your Google Alerts page.

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Making money through selling your content - www.constant-content.com

Consider the case where you have started blogging very recently, and the money you are making from Adsense or from other similar advertising programs is not very high (Ignore all those ads that say that you can make $4,000 dollars per day from the first week onwards - if people could do that, why would they be selling the secret for $50). However, you believe that you have an engaging style of writing, and this will drive more people towards your blog. Further, if there is way for you to make some money through selling articles, why not ?
Well, now is the time to meet reality. It is not until we have been tested that we realize that what we thought was excellent is only good, and what we had thought as Good is not so good. So, the question remains as to how to get your writing judged ? Well, there is a way to do so. There are sites that act as a marketplace between content providers and buyers. This is indeed way to make money through selling your articles ? You could make money through this !
Time for a reality check, you need to find somebody who can do this for you. Well, there is a site called ConstantContent (link) that acts as such a market place, and gives you the chance to make money from your writing. How do you use this as an evaluation of your writing style ? Well, the site has human editors, who will evaluate your content and then decide whether it is worthy. They would also be willing to offer feedback about what went wrong, and could be improved. On the other hand, if your writing is indeed good, you could evaluate the requests made and write articles similar to these requests.
Your content will also not be freely available on the internet.

Constant-Content is unique in that we do not allow search engines to index our articles. As a consequence, when you purchase a unique or full rights license for one of our articles you can be certain that you will be the first on the Internet to post this article and you will receive the benefits of having unique, interesting and link-worthy content.

Read more about how they accept articles (link)

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Optimizing your Wordpress account - 1

In 2 previous posts where I described problems with my Wordpress account, the preliminary solutions prescribed were:
- Keep your Wordpress account updated to the latest release
- Keep spam to a minimum, including emptying the Akismet spam folder on a regular basis

These are just temporary solutions, given that Wordpress is supposed to be not yet including optimization code in it and as a result, takes more CPU than required (see a description of Wordpress optimization deficiences on this page).

What are some of the other things you can do:
1. Review the list of plugins that are in use. A number of users download a number of plugins and keep them active. Each plugin is a performance hit of some sort, and you should review your plugins to see which of these plugins are really necessary vs. plugins that do not add much value and are a performance hit.
2. Use some sort of caching in order to prevent each page hit querying the database and slowing down the server. You can use WP-Cache (link) or you can use Word Super Cache (link)
3. Using graphics. If you have a number of graphics, those are additional graphics that need to be served to your users. As an example, refer this calculation from Wordpress Codex:

For example, let's say the front page of your blog calls upon 8 graphics to create the "look" of your blog's design. Add to this number the various WordPress template files it takes to build your page. You've got the header, sidebar, footer, and post content area at a minimum. That's four more "calls" to files on your site. For 100 visitors, those files get loaded 1200 times. For 1000 visitors, those files are accessed and loaded 12000 times. This increases your bandwidth and server activity.

4. Use spam filters such as Akismet to prevent comment spam
5. Try and get others to host your content. You have some great graphics or some analytics that need calculation which are done at run time. These also take server processing load, and is preferable to get content from elsewhere. For example, analyics information is also availabe at sites such as Google Analytics and all the calculation is done on those servers.