Quick Tips To Avoid Plagiarism Content

When it comes to seeking information regarding any subject, internet is the first place we look up to.

Unfortunately, a few websites today aren’t learner-friendly. Content creators in an aim to develop something beautiful and easily accessible, they tend to forget the learner’s goal. And they end up stealing others intellectual properties, which is why surfers often come across similar texts posted on different sites without any citation done.

However, this may or may not be intentional. As Google is very strict about the content quality and keeps on making newer algorithm updates, it is important to check your content thoroughly before it is live. Read on to know the ways to avoid the chances of plagiarism.

Quick Tips To Avoid Plagiarism Content

Here are three quick tips which can help you in avoidinig plagiarism content and improving your reputation in eye of Google.

Paraphrase it appropriately

SEO writers are quick to learn the art of doing detailed internet research, in order to compose an article on any topic. And in an intention to save time, they often end up adopting some questionable habits, which automatically hinders the search engine optimization efforts. This is why Google’s algorithms are used to find out duplicate content. If two texts have consecutive 4 words common, the document that has been posted first will appear at first.

Though, composing unique content is appreciated, if you are running short of ideas you can paraphrase it from some other texts. However, remember to choose completely separate set of words while paraphrasing. It is recommended to make a fresh start rather than jumbling the words.

Avoid Repeating Structure

Duplicating words is not only considered as an act of plagiarism, but also duplicating structure is illegal in a lot of cases. Whether it is due to impending deadline or lack of ideas, writers often get tempted to borrow ideas. Hence, making use of an article to create a new one is plagiarism. While writing SEO article originality is essential, in order to maintain the site’s reputation.

Fortunately, there are a few online sources, which enable the writers to get their works check for plagiarism before posting it. These sites, other than displaying the percentage of the duplicate text, they provide links to the documents, thereby highlighting the words that were copied. Therefore, it is suggested to pass your article through such plagiarism tool in order to avoid any duplicity.

Even after restrictions self-plagiarism do happen. And one of the main reasons behind this is writers composing articles on same topic almost regularly. Unknowingly, often words or sentences are repeated. Thus, using a plagiarism tool may help to avoid such mistakes.

Highlight Original Ideas

Be original while creating your content.

Not only will this lessen the probability of plagiarism, but also will draw more traffic towards the post. Learners or surfers would take interest in your blog post, if they find something new has been offered. This way it will boost the ranking in the popular search engine as well. And in order to bring forth new ideas, you would need to do a great deal of research. Therefore, avoid taking resource from a particular link.

Prepared using the http://plagiarism-detect.org/

Read more: http://allbloggingtips.com/2014/05/20/to-dos-for-avoiding-plagiarism/#ixzz34nUL4miN

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The Crucial Difference Between Building a Blog and Building a Business

Are you building a blog or building a business?

Do you think of yourself — and perhaps describe yourself — as a “blogger”?

Or are you a freelancer, entrepreneur, consultant, ebook author, or similar?

When I got started in blogging, I was really excited by the idea of building a blog that made money. But I didn’t initially see myself as someone who was in business.

As a result, it took me months to start making any money. It wasn’t until I accidentally fell into freelancing (the first blog I guest posted for invited me to become a paid writer) that I began to think in a more business-like way.

So what’s the difference?

If you’re building a blog and you want to make money, then you’re focusing on the wrong thing.

If you’re building a business, you might not be making money yet, but at least you’re moving in the right direction.

Here’s something important to remember: your blog itself is not your business. Your blog is a marketing tool for your business.

What Numbers Are You Focusing On?

When I started blogging, I obsessed about a lot of different numbers, like:

• How many subscribers I had
• How much traffic I was getting
• How many Twitter followers I had

… and so on.

These days, I often don’t remember to check my stats — because I’m focused on the business metric that really matters: how much money am I making?

That might sound a bit cold and profit-focused to you. If your main motivation for blogging is to have an audience for your ideas, then you may not care about making money (though you might want to run a few ads or take donations to cover your hosting costs). That’s fine.

But if you want your blog to be something more than a hobby — potentially a full-time living — then you really need to think beyond your blog itself.

That means figuring out how exactly you’re going to make money. What does your business provide — what service or product do you offer?

That could be:

• You sell ebooks (or print books, or ecourses) on a particular topic, and you blog about the same topic — though in less detail.
• You sell coaching or consulting and your blog is aimed at your clients, covering the sorts of topics they want to know about.
• You run in-person workshops or classes, and your blog covers similar topics, with a focus on your geographical area.
• You offer a particular service, like freelance writing or design, and your blog is aimed at your clients.

Of course, many bloggers use a combination of these, and that can be a great way to use your blog to maximum effect. For instance, you might offer a particular service but also sell a “do-it-yourself” ebook.

Note: Some large blogs run lots of ads and make money that way. This requires a big audience, though, and it’s not a business strategy that I’d recommend to new bloggers: there are much easier ways to build a successful business.

Many successful entrepreneurs in the blogging world started out just like you. They may well have launched a blog without much of a plan in mind, or without a clear idea of how they’d make it profitable.

But somewhere along the way, they all, without exception, turned their blog into a genuine business. And you can do the same.

Your Next Steps

If your current business plan looks something like “grow my blog and monetize it”, figure out exactly what you’re going to do (starting right now) to bring in money.

What service can you offer, or what product could you sell? How could you get started by offering that service or product for free, so you can get some testimonials?

Tell us about your business ideas, or about your thoughts on blogs vs businesses, in the comments below.

Quick reminder: If you’re yet to start your blog, don’t forget that our courseGet Blogging is open for new members until Friday 13th June.

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SEO Best Practices: Setting Up a Blog

Your blog should be the centerpiece of a larger initiative, one that engages your target audience in a "human" way, with the goal of creating signals that will aid/support what you're trying to achieve with SEO.

One mistake many businesses still make is creating posts that consist of self-promotion with little "meat" to entice anyone to engage with the content, much less share the content (in the hopes that you might earn a link or two, or any "viral" activity to the post, whatsoever).

What Are You Trying to Achieve?

One of the first things you have to consider is – indeed – what you're trying to achieve. How you answer the following questions will guide one of the most important steps that you'll take when setting up a blog:

• Do you have issues with reputation management – i.e., negative brand mentions in the search engine results pages (SERPs)?
• Are you trying to build thought-leadership for your company/brand?
• Are you trying to build a channel to drive deep linking to specific pages of your website?
• Are you trying to build depth of content or develop a tool to target "human queries" for your otherwise "corporate" website?
• Do you want your blog to be non-branded and/or seen as a unique "unbiased" voice in your industry?

Setting Up Your Blog

Once you know you're trying to achieve, you need to consider where the blog resides. Should you use a subdirectory, a subdomain, a completely separate domain, or either WordPress or Blogger? Let's look at all the options.

Blog on a Subdirectory

More often than not, this is how I recommend clients set up a blog. In my opinion (and "yes", SEOs will have varying opinions on this), adding fresh content to the root domain is a good thing. I also believe that having an RSS feed of "latest blog posts" to the home page of the website is a good thing.

I believe that promoting content that resides "on" the website is a good thing because you can earn (deep) links and provide balance to your link profile. And, I believe that having thought-leadership content that is closely associated with your brand (resides, again, on the domain) is a good thing.

Pros:

• Add fresh content to the root domain.
• Add deep links (from other websites)/social signals directly to root domain (assuming that you've promoted this content well).

Cons:

• Won't provide an additional "brand" listing (in most cases) in the SERPs, so doesn't serve well for reputation management.
• No direct ability to get links "from another website/sub-domain".

Blog on a Subdomain

A good case can be made for why you might want to blog on a subdomain.

For example, perhaps you have issues with reputation management (perhaps someone posted to review complaint sites like Ripoff Report, Pissed Consumer, etc.) so you need to occupy additional real estate in the SERPs. By building your blog on a subdomain, you accomplish this by providing the search engines another "official web presence" (the search engines will treat this as a separate entity) for your company, that should rank when folks search your company name.

The nice thing about having a blog on a sub-domain is that it will also piggyback on the authority of your root website (hopefully you already have some authority on your root domain) and posts there can rank, without the need to build up the authority for a new website.

Pros:

• Get an additional brand presence in the SERPs that you control.
• Get links "from another website" (subdomains are treated pretty much as such); Ability to deep-link to specific pages within the root.
• Piggyback on the already "built" (again, making an assumption here) authority of the root domain.
• Can be hosted anywhere. Very important consideration for those on a content management system that does not provide a blogging platform.

Cons:

• Not as much freshness on the domain.
• Content that "hits" (gets good promotion/links) doesn't add as much link value to the root.

Blog on a Separate Domain

Some people like to create a "non-official" blog presence, to have control over a website that isn't directly tied to the brand. They want to have an "unbiased" voice (at least give the appearance of such) and probably use this to occasionally link to their main website.

I typically discourage these types of initiatives, for many reasons – not the least of which is the amount of effort that would need to go into making this new web presence gain any amount of trust/traction or authority.

Pros:

• Can create an "unbiased" resource (that just happens to link to your corporate website, on occasion).
• If the content is good, and it becomes respected in your industry, the blog can gain authority that can then be passed through to your corporate website through "unbiased" linking.

Cons:

• There's a better than average chance that gaining good authority/ability for posts to rank is going to take considerable time.
• Does little to really show thought-leadership for your company.
• If you really do drop links to the corporate website, there's a good chance that it'll be seen for what it is: a paid advertisement, not an official unbiased reference. The backlash from this could be (should be) huge.

Blog on WordPress.com or Blogger

Some pretty large companies have gone this route because – to them – it's the easiest to execute. Mind you, a link from WordPress.com isn't a bad thing, but how does this help with any of the aforementioned reasons why you might want to blog in the first place?

Are you tying in the "thought leadership" to the brand? Are you adding fresh content to the domain? Are you aiding your abilities to provide an additional "official brand presence" to the SERPs? (Perhaps, but you're better off with subdomain).

Pros:

• You could create some very aggressive link building tactics or "test" things without burning the domain.
• You would gain a link that is coming from an authority domain (remember, a quality link profile is about gaining links from many different/authoritative/relevant websites/domains; not many links on one domain)
• Easy. Just about anyone can get engaged and start blogging today.

Cons:

• Limitations as to how you can design/template to fit your brand.
• Any content promoted (linked to) won't provide direct value to your main company website/domain.
• Inability to utilize plugins.
• Cheesy. It is what it is. Not gonna be a great representation for your company.

Summary

Blogging should be a part of any sound marketing plan, nowadays. You need to create engagement and provide the ability for people to share content coming from your company. Face it, very few people are going to feel compelled to share your "service page", much less link to it.

Do blogging for the right reasons, and set it up in the right manner for your needs and you'll realize positive results.

Now that you've addressed best practices for setting up your blog, realize that you're just getting started...

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How to Get Out of Niches and Blog for a Purpose Instead

Money is not everything. Anything beyond an optimum amount causes more misery than happiness.

Yet, with a stereotypical assumption that most of us want to make money (let’s not kid ourselves by saying “no” to this assumption), we all have a tendency to get stuck in a rut: the dirty groove of a routine that we get comfortable with over time. Even the advice we receive, the articles we write, and everything we believe in becomes congruent with this comfort zone.

For bloggers, it translates to finding niches, writing 500 word posts, and promoting your blog using the same methods we’ve always been used to. That includes social media, asking for links, putting up sign-up forms for opt-ins, some paid advertising, and then wondering how else to promote the blog.

If you’ve been doing whatever you’ve been doing, how will you get to where you want to go?

It’s time to do something different.

We all know passion pours energy into our life. It gives us more chutzpah to do what we want. It drives our efforts to reach our goals.

If you pick niches, blog multiple times a day, and work like a machine to promote your blog, here’s what happens..

Passion wears out..

Frustration sets in..

You’ll develop stress. Finally, you’ll give up.

Ignore the popular advice.

Forget the damn niches. 

If you have to blog, do so for a purpose. Here are different ways to find your purpose:

What is that one thing that pisses you off?

We all have our pet peeves, don’t we?

Maybe you love to do something but your lifestyle is your biggest enemy. Maybe you actually travel and you don’t like the way immigration procedures and visa restrictions don’t allow you to travel free. You could have been scammed online before and you just can’t get over it. Or maybe you got dumped unceremoniously by your girlfriend. Perhaps, you hate the well-orchestrated, social brainwash that marriage really is.

Find your biggest source of frustration; go and blog about it. Chances are that you’ll not worry about word counts and blog post lengths. There’s a possibility that many others in the world would relate to you.

Relating to the topic on hand, by the way, is half the business done.

Find a real business, blog for that business

Don’t blog about a topic. Instead, find a real business and apply your passion for blogging into a blog built for your business. Why? An unbelievable amount of “you” gets into your business, whether you know it or not.

Hatching that idea, sticking with it, and grabbing a business plan template off the web are the starting points. Beyond that, you’d give your business everything (including startup capital, sacrifices, the comfort of a day job, and the wholesome approval of people who mean so much to you). You will not sound or feel normal after so much goes into starting and running a business.

Your blog now reflects the new “you,” doesn’t it? Whatever you went through until this stage of your business (assuming you go with this idea) helps you communicate better. You are stronger, and you have an attitude to kill for.

Blog for a cause, to make a difference

If starting and running a full-fledged business (such as ecommerce, maybe) is not your thing, let’s get back to blogging.

Niches are popular and commercial. They evoke responses from customers such as “buy,” “buy later,” “no way, it’s too expensive,” and “nah, not for me.” If you don’t directly pitch for anything in your blog, all you’ll get is “ah,” “duh,” or “I see. Wow!”

Blog for a cause, instead, and you’ll mostly get responses like “I so want to help, if I could,” “Where is the donate button?” “I like what this person does,” “This is so true,” and “Wow, really?”

Now, causes don’t have to charitable. You could find a cause within commercial domains too. You can find a cause anywhere. All you have to do is look for something that’s troubling you, and you know that a lot of other people are also affected by it.

Look at what SaltyDroid does:

The trouble seed: Online scammers on the rise

The cause: Exposing scammers, thieves, and fraud “gurus” with make-believe opportunities

Does SaltyDroid sell anything? No.

Does it get traffic? Next question please.

Experiment until you find the purpose

Learning the art of blogging after you find your purpose will draw you in very late to the game. When the purpose comes calling, you have to hit the ground running. You have to be ready by then. That’s why it’s important to keep blogging everyday. How do you become a better blogger? Write blog posts every day.

What’s the secret to passionate blogging? Using your well-developed blogging skills to write about things that matter to you (and others).

In a nutshell, you have to do all the dreaming, thinking, and executing while you already have a blog in place. Now, you know that your choice of niche wouldn’t matter too. Pick a topic, start a blog and run with it. Think of this as your experiment.

Experiment until you find your passion. Once you find it, give your blog everything you’ve got.

Grammar? Rules? What’s that?

Read all the blogs you want on “how to blog better.” Brush up on your basics of writing (add copywriting to the mix). Yet, don’t think that what you read is the only “right” way to do things out there. You can make your own rules. Copywriters, for instance, break rules all the time. Find your voice. Make your writing reflect that voice. If you have to twist sentence structures, do so. If you have to invent your own words or phrases, like labeling yourself as an “anti-niche blogging rebel” go ahead and do it.

This is your playground. Go play. 

Your passion should show. Success will follow.

Are you stuck with niches or are you blogging from your heart? Do you have a purpose yet? Share it with us!

Read more: http://allbloggingtips.com/2013/12/17/blog-for-a-purpose/#ixzz2nwEJI4WG

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7 Big Facebook Changes You Should Know About for a Better Facebook Strategy

Facebook changes so fast, I often miss new features or updates to existing ones. Since there have been a few changes recently, I thought it would be helpful to do a bit of a wrap-up of what Facebook’s been up to.

1. Images are now bigger and wider – Here are the right sizes to use

Some recent changes to how Facebook displays thumbnail images mean that we need to be more aware of the size and aspect ration of any pictures we post. Because Facebook will automatically resize images that don’t match its specifications, we really need to remember these details for our images to look right.

The aspect ratio is very specific: image widths need to be 1.91 times the height. This will mean the image scales perfectly in both the desktop News Feed and on mobile. Images are now larger when shown in the News Feed, so keeping the aspect ratio right will make sure your images look great wherever the user sees them.

Recommended image sizes have also changed for Facebook’s desktop News Feed and mobile views. For the News Feed, Facebook recommends thumbnail images of 400×209 pixels. Images that are smaller than these dimensions will be resized to either 154×154 or 90×90 pixels.

Jon Loomer made some amazing graphics to show you what the right, new sizes are:

On mobile, Facebook’s recommended image size is 560×292. Images smaller than this will be resized to 100×100 pixels.

It seems strange that mobile images are expected to be larger than thumbnails for the desktop News Feed, but Jon Loomer suggests this could be due to the lack of a sidebar on mobile, leaving more space for large images, and the increased usage of tablets with larger screens than smartphones.

2. News Feed ranking is now smarter, including 100,000 individual weights

Not so long ago I wrote about how Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm works to determine which posts show up in a user’s News Feed. The algorithm has been developing alongside Facebook’s overall growth, and now uses up to 100,000 individual weights to determine which posts appear in the News Feed.

The latest iteration of the algorithm could be compared to the growth of search engines like Google and Bing. Both use complicated algorithms with many signals included, such as social and personalization, to determine which search results to show a user. Facebook’s algorithm has become more sophisticated over time in a similar way.

When Facebook launched the News Feed in 2006, it was designed to show users the most important content from their friends all in one place. The tricky part is deciding what’s important to each user:

Facebook says that the typical user has about 1,500 stories that could show in the News Feed on every visit.

What shows up on a user’s News Feed is determined by measuring signals that show how close a user is to friends or Pages, as well as global interaction signals:

For example, if we show an update to 100 users, but only a couple of them interact with it, we may not show it in your News Feed. But if a lot of people are interacting with it, we might decide to show it to you, too.

The way users access Facebook affects what they see, as well. The algorithm takes into account that some types of content don’t perform as well on particular devices—for instance, some content is impossible to show on old feature phones.

It’s even smart enough to recognize when a user has a slow Internet connection, and show more text updates that load quickly.

Facebook recently announced a series of blog posts called News Feed FYI that will “highlight major updates to News Feed and explain the thinking behind them.” If you want to stay on top of changes to the News Feed algorithm, this is a good place to start.

3. There are new and improved Page insights

Facebook’s insights for Pages recently got an update that makes them more useful for marketers.

The new insights view includes graphs of Page likes growth, post reach and engagement. It also includes a post clicks section which shows how many times a post received a “stealth click”—i.e. a click that doesn’t result in a story.

You can add benchmarks to your insights now, to test how well your Page performs over certain time periods. This could be really helpful in testing different post types, times or lengths over short periods.

Engagement statistics are now broken down to make them more useful—showing negative feedback, and the breakdown between likes, comments and shares.

If you’ve read up about optimal times to share on Facebook, you’ll know that it can be tricky to nail down. Optimal timing can differ for each individual Page depending on the audience, so it’s best to figure out what works for you specifically. Thankfully, the new Facebook insights make this easier than ever before. You can now see how many of your fans are spending time on Facebook (in general, not just on your Page) on each day of the week.

You can also drill down by a specific day to see how the timing changes.

 

Lastly, you can break down your engagement insights to see how much engagement is coming from users who already like your Page vs. those who don’t. This can be really useful in working towards posting content that your fans will like.

4. Finally, you can now edit already published posts

A really recent change Facebook made is the introduction of an “edit” feature on posts. The feature is being rolled gradually out to web and Android users first, with iOS still on the way.

This is the first time we’ve had the ability to change posts rather than simply deleting them when we realize we’ve made a mistake too late.

As well as editing a post after publishing, the new feature will let users keep a history of changes they’ve made.

5. You can now Auto-play videos

A lesser-known feature that’s only in a testing phase right now is auto-play for videos in the News Feed:

Now when you see a video in News Feed, it comes to life and starts playing. Videos initially play silently, and if you want you can tap to play with sound in full screen. Scroll past if you don’t want to watch.

Initially, only videos from personal profiles, verified Pages, and Pages of bands and musicians will auto-play.

To start with, this feature is only being tested on Facebook for mobile, and should be rolling out over the next few weeks.

6. Public Feed API and Keyword Insights API

In an effort to make Facebook discussions part of the global conversations around trending topics, Facebook recently opened up two new APIs to selected news partners like CNN, Buzzfeed and Slate.

The Public Feed API will display a “real-time feed of public posts for a specific word.” Only posts that are public (i.e. from Pages or profiles with the “follow” option turned on) will become part of this feed. This will allow news partners to display a feed of Facebook posts about breaking news alongside their coverage.

The Keyword Insights API uses data from all Facebook users, and pulls out anonymous insights about the number of mentions of a specific term. This can also include demographic breakdowns, such as gender, age and location.

So far these tools are exclusive to a small group of Facebook news partners while they’re tested and improved. This is definitely an area to keep an eye on, though. With so much of our data in its hands, it will be interesting to see how Facebook puts it to use.

7. You can embed Facebook posts – Get more likes and follows

At the end of July Facebook announced that posts would be embeddable on other sites. Public Facebook posts from profiles and Page (not groups or comments) including all types of media can be embedded.

Users can engage with posts that are embedded on other sites by liking Pages, following users, liking or commenting on posts and watching video posts.

Kristi Hines makes some great points on Social Media Examiner about how to use embedded posts well, including replacing screenshots with embedded posts so that users can engage with your examples and using embedded posts to share photos or videos to encourage more interaction on your Facebook Page. Kristi also points out how useful this can be for increasing likes on your Page:

While you can’t always like or comment on the embedded post itself without being taken to Facebook, you can click on the button at the top right of the embedded post to like the page.

This means any embedded posts you use from your page could help boost your number of fans!

To see that in reality, here is a recent Buffer facebook post embedded for you:

Did I miss anything? Have you got thoughts to add on any of these new features? Let us know in the comments.

Image credits: Jon Loomer, NBC News, Facebook 1 and 2, Inside Facebook

P.S. If you liked this post, you might also like 7 Powerful Facebook statistics you should know for a more engaging Facebook page and A scientific guide to posting Tweets, Facebook posts, Emails and Blog posts at the best time.

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Internet Marketing 101: How To Get Testimonials

As I mentioned on this post, one element that virtually any sales page should have is a list of testimonials. That is, people who bought/used the product in the past and liked it.

Getting those testimonials is not always straight forward, so here are some strategies you can use for this purpose:

1. Don’t Use Fake Testimonials

I’ve seen people around the web encouraging you to create fake testimonials while you don’t have any. I don’t agree with this approach. First and foremost for the ethical aspect. Second because often it will be possible to identify your fake testimonials, and the result could backfire.

2. Ask Beta Testers

On the sub-title of your testimonial section you could say something like “Check what some people who already used our product had to say about it…”. Notice the “used” instead of “bought”. In other words, this means you could invite beta testers to try your product for free and ask them for a testimonial, and since you are not claiming the testimonials are only from people who actually bought your product it would be fine. If you want to be 100% transparent you could even mention that the testimonial is coming from a beta tester.

3. Explicitly Ask Users

Rarely customers will come to you with an spontaneous testimonial. In other words, you need to explicitly ask them if you want some. You could email them 30 days after the purchase, for instance, or include a paragraph on the page where they will be redirected after the purchase.

4. Give Them an Incentive

Writing a testimonial takes a bit of time, and most people are lazy. If you give them a small incentive, therefore, the number of testimonials you’ll get could skyrocket. The incentive could be an ebook or a mention on the blog of your company, for instance. Just make it clear that the incentive is a “thank you” gesture for the time the client will take to write and send the testimonial, and not a bribe to get him to write only positive things about your product.

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