5 Tactics To Fight Back Against Copycat Bloggers

Credit: twvogel

There are three types of bloggers out there. In one group, we have a bunch of people who know how to come up with original blog posts on a consistent basis. These bloggers have mastered the art of grabbing an idea and looking at it from a unique angle. In the second group, we have a group of bloggers that come up with original ideas once in a while but mostly rely on other bloggers to do the job for them. The third group, which I happen to dislike a lot, are copycat bloggers. These bloggers not only steal your ideas but sometimes don’t even bother changing your posts enough to differentiate themselves.

There is nothing more frustrating than working so hard to come up with an original blog post, only to see someone else still your idea and run with it. To be frank, you can’t really complain about someone grabbing the idea behind your blog post and coming up with a unique post on the very same topic. But it is frustrating when someone copies you and your points and only changes the words around (we are not even going to talk about blog thieves).

I happen to believe in free competition. There is nothing wrong with someone looking at a blog post and deciding to write a better, more powerful post on the very same topic. That’s fair game. After all, your post idea is not that important. What you do with it and how you build your content around that idea is what matters. Copycat bloggers are more frustrating to deal with. These are folks who pick up your post, spin the words, add some nonsense to it, and post it to their own blogs. I wouldn’t go as far as calling them content thieves, but their approach is certainly unethical.

Many new bloggers worry about their blog posts being lifted by copycats. Some folks are good at writing posts and some are good at lifting them. While I do encourage bloggers to mark their content and let people know that their content is copyrighted, I wouldn’t worry too much about copycat bloggers. You can obviously use services such as CopyScape to find out who’s plagiarizing your content. But you can never stop unethical people from doing unethical things.

Thankfully, there are ways you can keep yourself ahead of your copycats and expose them for what they are. Your audience is not stupid, so as long as you put your best effort forward with your content, they’ll know who’s for real and who’s just a copycat. In fact, here are 5 tactics you can take advantage of to stay ahead of those annoying copycat bloggers:

• Unique Content: as long as you are coming up with content that is unique to your blog on a consistent basis, you have an edge over copycats. They can lift your content and copy your ideas, but they can’t copy your approach and blogging process. I do encourage you to link to your own posts often to make the process more difficult for copycats.
• Unique Voice: copycat bloggers can duplicate your blog and steal your ideas, but they can not duplicate your voice. If you have found your unique blogging voice, you are one step ahead of content thieves.
• Frequency: one way to make things difficult for copycat bloggers is by writing unique content on a more frequent basis. So instead of writing two times a week, you can write 4 times a week. You should also distribute your content in the social media (with the help of your readers) just to brand your content before content thieves can grab it.
• Outdo The Pretenders: sometimes you are not dealing with content thieves but people who are trying hard to beat you in your own game. These are people who copy your idea and try to outdo you in your own game. To beat these people, you are going to need deeper, higher quality content. Now this is something that can make you a better blogger.
• Change Your Code: while you can’t stop people from copying your content, you can always make the process more difficult for them. You can take advantage of action-based coding to disable hot-linking or right-click copy function on your blog. Your .htaccess file can be another place to add some of these limitations.

It all comes down to how much effort you put forward towards creating high quality content on your blog. The more research you put in and the more deep analysis your blog posts contain, the harder it will be for others to duplicate you. Your blog’s look and feel and your ideas can be duplicated but not your thought process.