Plagiarism Online

By Adam  |  10 Oct 2015 12:00:00

If you're going to do content marketing for your eCommerce website, then you are doubtlessly going to need a large supply of ideas. These ideas can come from all kinds of places: things that happen to you during your everyday life, current affairs and even from the blogs of your competitors. Yes, that's right; it's perfectly fine to 'borrow' some ideas from your competitors, but let me use this post to give you a quick guideline for doing this.

Never read a competitors post and then copy and paste it onto your blog and then share it as your own work. This is a clear cut case of plagiarism. Even if you change a few words here and there, you really shouldn't be copying and pasting somebody else's content for your own site. You could get into a lot of trouble for this. Even if there was just one particular sentence which sounded good, don't do it. Personally I'd avoid even using the same title, but that's, perhaps, over cautious. Also, if you have been inspired by a piece which is somewhat opinionated, I'd avoid coming to the same conclusion as them, because then it might look like you just flat-out ripped off their work. The best approach is to read a piece by a competitor, cover the same general concepts and ideas, but take it in your own, unique direction.

So I hope that has given you a good idea of what is and what is not okay when it comes to taking ideas from others for content marketing. The last thing you want is to get in trouble with a competitor, but at the same time it is important to have a nice collection of content on your site. So feel free to take ideas from other blogs, just don't take things too far! The more content on your site, the more Google searches you'll come up in and the more customers you'll get. But if you don't even have an eCommerce website to do content marketing for, then sign up to Sellr now and make one for no cost at all!