issue 26: safeguard your site against copycats

Dear Colleague,

welcome to TheJungleMarketer´s first newsletter issue this year. I hope you had a great start and that you are motivated to actually carry out all the steps to achieve your goals for 2006.

Today´s topics:

1) Know what people want.

2) Safeguard your site against copycats. How to find copycats.

3) Profit pulling tutorials.

Enjoy !

1) Know What People Want

You´ve probably already heard it quite often: don´t try to sell stuff that YOU think people need, sell the stuff that PEOPLE WANT.

So, how do you know what people want ?

Well, it´s quite simple if you have a contact list like a newsletter - just ask. But if you haven´t such a list, there are still two other good ways to find out what they want:

- be a subscriber of a few popular newsletters in your niche. Some publishers do polls and surveys quite often and publish the results in their newsletters and on their websites.

- participate in forums and see which topics are most popular and for what kind of problems people are asking for advice over and over again. Hey - I actually got the idea for my first video tutorial (about the RSS parser “CaRP” ) from a forum post, where one guy said he would rather pay 100 bucks to the one who showed him how to use CaRP than spending the money on a commercial software with even less features.

If you are new to our community: two weeks ago, I´ve sent out a short announcement, asking everybody to tell me on what topics they would like to see (video) tutorials.

Here´s a list of the most frequently asked for topics in a random order. Maybe you find a topic that you can cover with a tutorial:

- How to open archived files in Winzip and how to archive and compress files in ZIP format to offer them as downloads.

The first part is already covered here:
how to extract zip archives

I´m writing a tutorial about an alternative free zip tool (IZArc). This tutorial will also cover the second part: how to create new zip archives and add files to zip archives, plus some more useful things you can do with IZArc.

UPDATE (March 2006): The more comprehensive tutorial for working with ZIP archives is now available at EasyWebTutorials.com - IZArc Tutorial.

- How to start a multimedia blog, especially how to add streaming video and video RSS feeds to a blog, how to create a Vlog (Video Blog)

- Outsourcing. How to use Elance, how to hire ghostwriters, what kind of jobs (others than writing) should be hired out.

- Webdesign - basic things like adding pop-ups, subscription boxes, payment buttons and different javascript codes to webpages.

- Blogging - how to optimize a WordPress blog for the search engines and use WP to create a niche content site. How to auto post articles, RSS and datafeeds to a WP blog.

- Hosting / Cpanel - basic things like setting up an email account and email aliases, create mysql databases and users, cronjobs, subdomains, add-on domains, FTP, CHMOD, etc …

- Webcopy - how to write good web copy and compose successful order pages and lead generating pages.

- Profiting from Google AdSense

- Installing and configuring all kinds of website scripts. Where to find good free alternatives to commercial software.

- Using product datafeeds from affiliate merchants, XML feeds and downloadable feeds.

You see, it´s quite a lot to keep me busy for a few months. So, if you have a certain knowledge in any of these topics, why not help and create a tutorial ?

It´s an easy way to create a useful infoproduct of your own. Depending on the topic, you might sell your product or give it away to generate leads. Heck, you might even turn it into a viral lead or traffic generator.

2) How to find copycats and safeguard your site against them.

Are you afraid of someone copying your web content without your permission ? And how about people publishing your articles on their webpages without an active link back to your site ?

Fortunately, it´s quite easy to find out if a copycat has stolen your content or to find dishonest publishers violating your terms for publishing your articles.

First, your articles:

If you are using articles to promote your website / business, then you want other people to republish your articles on their websites and in their newsletters. Of course, they need to publish your articles along with your resource box which includes an active link to your website and this link should also be spiderable by the search engines.

To check if everybody complies with your terms, you can do a quick and simple search on Google for the titles of your articles and then visit the results that come up in the search.

Not all of the resulting pages may have your full article, some display only the title and a summary from the RSS feed of an article directory to which you have submitted your article.

If you find someone who does not give you the proper credit (active link), try to contact the website owner and tell this person to activate the link. Set a deadline of a few days and if you don´t get any respond, you may report the site to Google to possibly have it shut down (more on that later).

Second, the copycats:

While the first point ain´t such dramatic, copycats are a real pest. Copycats are people who copy your website content that you do NOT want to see on other websites. For example: testimonials, sales copy, product reviews, price comparison charts, tutorials, e-courses and other things you´ve put quite a lot of work into.

This type of content which is designed to pull in revenue for you is most likely to be stolen by a lazy copycat. So let´s try to find those pesky copycats:

For all content that you have already published on your own website, you can simply use a service like CopyScape.

Simply enter the URL of the webpage that you want to check and CopyScape will read your page and compare it to other pages on the web. In the results that come up you can quickly see the matching content because these parts are highlighted.

At CopyScape.com. you will also find some great tips for the steps you should take to contact the copyright violators and eventually report the copycats to Google to have their sites shut down.

If you are hiring ghostwriters at Elance, you also need to be careful. Even though you state in your project description that the articles written for you must not contain plagiarism, some writers will still be tempted to copy certain copyrighted information from the web.

Therefore, to prevent you from being accused for copyright violation, you should check the articles that you get from a ghostwriter for copied content.

You can do this before publishing the articles: pick out a few short phrases and do an “exact search” for them on Google. Currently, you can search Google for phrases with up to 32 words.

Or you publish the articles first and then run the pages through CopyScape to see if anything comes up.

And finally, an easy trick that may scare off possible copycats. At CopyScape you find a lot of “site protection” banners that you can display on all your webpages. You can see such a banner in action on EasyWebTutorials.

I don´t have any evidence if this works but I believe it does. Knowing that you are serious about protecting your website content and your rights will surely keep copycats away.

3) Profit pulling tutorials.

Here is something for you that I want you to copy and distribute as much as you can. Profit Pulling Tutorials is a free service I´ve recently started for ezine publishers in the online marketing and home business niche.

My plan is to create tutorials, e-courses and articles that are designed to promote affiliate products and allow you to republish and distribute all these materials with your affiliate links to the recommended products instead of mine.

You could use the tutorials and e-courses as free give-aways to get more subscribers to your list and feature the articles in your newsletter and also publish them on your website or your blog.

Right now, there´s the blogging video tutorial, a RSS syndication tutorial and two articles that you can customize with your affiliate links and give away to your subscribers.

Sincerely Yours,

Guido W. Stiehle
TheJungleMarketer