Flaunt Your Sources Proudly on Your Blog, or Come Off Like a Scammer
There are plenty of blogs out there with bad
information on them. One of the ways that these blogs get away with publishing
bad information is by failing to cite sources and, when they do cite sources,
by quote mining. If you have good sources, you should flaunt them on your blog
properly so that everybody can see that you actually do your research before
you say something.
If you’re using a blog for business purposes or
personal purposes, one of your goals is going to be establishing yourself as
somebody worth listening to or, as the case may be, reading. Oftentimes, what
defines a real expert is the ability to find accurate information, rather than
having all of the information they need in their head and expecting their
audience to take their word for it that what they say is true.
First, the Format
When you have a good source, you want to be
able to show off to your readership that you did the work involved in making
sure that the information you are giving them is accurate. The best way to do
this is to follow academic standards for citation. The Purdue Online Writing Lab has excellent guidelines for citing all different types of sources.
Follow these guidelines and your blog will come off as classier, more
authoritative and certainly more worth the time investment required to read it
than are most of the blogs out there. Some <a
href="http://themefuse.com"> Premium WordPress themes </a>
make it very easy to add citations, links and tags to blog posts, streamlining
the process, which is one of the reasons that they’re so popular with bloggers.
Know When to Cite
Whenever you are saying something that isn’t
general knowledge and that isn’t the result of your own research, you have to
give a citation. You can look at a useful overview of copyright considerations
at About.com. Before you feel like adding citations is going to make it seem
like you’re just reproducing someone else’s work, you should understand what
citations actually do for your blog.
One of the most significant reasons that
businesses and individuals run blogs is for search engine optimization
purposes. Where search engine optimization is concerned, Google likes
authoritative sites. When you have links that lead to other important sites
that back up what you’re saying, it makes your site more useful of a resource to readers. Adding citations doesn't make your site less desirable. It doesn't set up your site as a pointer to other sites and nothing more. It demonstrates
to readers that your site is a good place to read about a given subject, as you
take the time to back up what you say with citations and sources and, of
course, Google will notice that.
If you are ever in doubt about whether or not
you have to give a citation, consider that to mean that a citation is most
certainly in order. It is always better to be safe than sorry in this regard.
Fair Use
Perhaps somewhat ironically, the concept of
Fair Use is invoked unfairly all the time. Fair use is a complex legal loophole
that allows people to use copyrighted material for certain purposes. They can
use it for reporting the news, or doing research, for parody and for some other
purposes. If you plan to use copyrighted material, the best route is to ask.
Don’t rely on Fair Use to get you out of legal hot water if you violate
somebody’s copyright.
Right now, ISPs and intellectual property
advocates are very hot on busting people for using intellectual properties
without permission. Because of that, you will always do better to ask
permission and, if you cannot use the original material, you generally are free
to reference it, link to it and criticize it as much as you’d like, as long as
you don’t reproduce anything that the intellectual property owner prohibits you
from reproducing.
Remember that a little attribution will go a
long way toward making your blog a better read and less of a liability.
About Guest author
Anny Solway is a dedicated writer at ThemeFuse – a
web studio that creates original <a
href="http://themefuse.com">WordPress themes</a>,
that can be used out of the box. She loves to share blogging and technology tips.
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