Ethics. It’s one of the most overlooked components of content marketing. Why? Because it’s not as fun as talking about blogging and social media? Or maybe it’s because people are generally unaware of the legal aspect of online marketing.
While the legal and ethical aspects of the content marketing world isn’t as fun as the others, it is immensely important.
Fortunately, you don’t need to be a lawyer to understand the law as it relates to marketing. Part I of this post will focus on content curation, while Part II will focus on guarding against infringement.
Content Curation
A lot of the legal mistakes that are made in content marketing involve curating other people’s content. Content curation is when you publish material that was written by others.
This is a common practice. As a matter of fact, most experts recommend that 60% of the material you post be other people’s content.
Sounds pretty easy right? Not really. The problems people tend to run into usually involve properly giving credit to original author of the content you post, using a variety of sources, and curating in a way that is only designed for search engines.
Mix It Up
When curating content, try not to use the same sources over and over again. You want to get your content from multiple sources. The more sources, the better. If you tend to post only content from a few different sources, you could possibly be gaining a profit from the work of the original author.
Besides, who wants to see material from the same author over and over and over again?
The last thing you want to do is bore your readers. Posting a variety of content opens up your readers to differing viewpoints and opinions.
Curate Content Carefully
One of the biggest mistakes one can make when posting content is curating for search engines, not for your audience. You must make sure that you are posting relevant and useful content that is actually written with some skill.
Unfortunately, many people use content that is chock full of keywords that are clearly used for SEO purposes. Material written in this way does not flow smoothly or provide useful information. In the end, they say a whole lot of nothing.
These are called “black hat” SEO techniques, and Google does not like them. If they catch you doing this, they will send your site to search engine purgatory and your content will never be seen again! It’s best to focus on content that is actually intended to benefit the reader, not push the site higher on their search engine results.
If you DON’T want a huge lawsuit or other legal issues, make sure you are curating content properly. It’ll save you lots of money.
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