Before your pay any money to the "Buy-A-Blog" guys!
Patricia Kennedy "There are likely to be other agents in your market area using the same service, and if a prospective client sees what could be plagiarized material either on your own website or on your ActiveRain blog, you will lose credibility in the integrity department - people get expelled from college for doing this stuff."
Right on target - and - Re-Blog!
Over the past few weeks, I've been getting emails from businesses who want to make my life easier. For a rather hefty fee, they will organize and manage my social media life, freeing me up to spend all of my time in the presence of the buyers and sellers their efforts will help me attract.
There's only one little problem.
I would not be their only customer!
And if I wanted to use their posts as my own here on ActiveRain (I'd have permission after all), the Community Guidelines clearly state that:
Points for blogging will only be awarded for your own original content.
Today, I had another adventure while doing a plagiarism check for my Sunday "Favorites" post. The agent has been on ActiveRain long enough to become a Millionaire, and her posts are usually warm and personal. I like her.
This particular post was really good and very well-written, but it just wasn't her style. So when I ran it through my checker? Oops!
It showed up on Realtor websites all over the country, including a bunch in her almost immediate market area. And I'm guessing that for any blog writing service, this duplication is part of the deal. To make each post exclusive to a single blogger they would have to charge and arm and a leg for their services.
The other question that troubles me is where do they get their material? Some of them have one or more staff writers to who supply them with posts, and often they will allow the client to go in to edit and personalize the content before publication. Others will simply lift material wherever they can find it on the web, opening up their clients to lawsuits from the creators of the original material.
Buy-A-Blog services may have a place on individual Realtor web sites. But on sites like ActiveRain they don't work as well for a bunch of reasons. So before you hire one of these outfits to blog for you, consider the following:
- The post will not be in your voice, and ActiveRain bloggers will take notice.
- Your audience is more sophisticated than most, and we tend to be able to pick up unoriginal content before it hits the ActiveRian blog feed.
- There are likely to be other agents in your market area using the same service, and if a prospective client sees what could be plagiarized material either on your own website or on your ActiveRain blog, you will lose credibility in the integrity department - people get expelled from college for doing this stuff.
- Using Buy-A-Blog posts could cost you referrals from other ActiveRain bloggers who write their own stuff.
If you have any questions, the ActiveRain Community Guidelines are a good place to find answers about what is kosher and not on this fun site.
And bottom line? Even if you are a really terrible writer, you are better off doing your own work here on ActiveRain. We have a stronger tolerance for bad writing than we do for un-original content!
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