Plagiarism is for chumps.

Ian Lurie of ConversationMarketing.com has a bone to pick – and we’re right there with him. On his blog, he recently wrote a post eloquently titled “Content thieves: I want to punch you in the face.” It turns out that several sites and so-called marketers had lifted his carefully thought-out content and used it in their own materials without any reference or credit (in fact, they replaced his company’s name with their own in several instances). In other words, they stole it and he’s outing them.

If you develop original content and want to prevent people from getting their copy and paste on, Ian has a few entertaining tips to booby-trap your content from plagiarists. But what if you’re hiring a writer to develop content for you? How can you ensure it’s legit (and yes, you need to. As the publisher of the work, YOU are responsible.)?

1. Pay a fair writing rate. While it’s not a guarantee, paying a reasonable rate for writing will reduce a writer’s temptation to get lazy. If you’ve hired someone to write ten 500-word articles for a measly $50, you need to remember: You get what you pay for. If this person was writing the articles legitimately, it could take them roughly ten hours to complete this assignment (including research, writing, editing, formatting and e-mailing with the client). That works out to a whopping $5 per hour. Ask yourself: How good of a job would I do for $5 per hour? The last time you earned that low a wage you were likely on your bike, hurling newspaper bundles onto your neighbors’ porches. On the flip side, a “writer” could instead spend two hours researching and copy-and-pasting existing articles into a document in under two hours, earning $25 per hour. Which do you think is more tempting?
2. Use Google to check the work out. Once you receive the work from your freelance writer and before you publish it, put a few lines from the document into Google and see if you come back with any exact matches. You may come back with a few, especially if there’s some generic wording, so take a look at those pages and compare it to what your writer handed in. If there are huge chunks of copy that are pretty near identical, you likely have plagiarism. Go back to your writer and look for an explanation (ideally, do this before paying them – you might be SOL otherwise).
3. Work with professionals. If you’re going to hire a writer for a major project – like a book or your entire website, it may be worthwhile for you to go to professional plagiarism hunters like Copyscape or iThenticate. Additionally, consider hiring a writer through a well-established content marketing agency. They’ll have screening and safeguards in place and will be able to guarantee the authenticity of the work.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Content Creation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.