Avoid Pissing-off Fellow Bloggers by Properly Citing Your Sources!

I can be a pretty vengeful blogger at times. Whenever I notice a blog that is posting quotations or videos from my sites without properly siting their sources, I am not happy, especially if such blogs are within my own niche. I’d write to them and kindly request that they mention where the pictures, video, or text they are displaying came from, but since I don’t have the free time to do that, I merely hold grudges against them. If somebody lifts my content and doesn’t give me the credit for the hard work I put into it, you can be sure they’ll never get a link from any of my sites. I imagine many bloggers are similar to myself in this regard.

If you don’t want to piss off fellow bloggers in such a way, I recommend that you follow these tips:

1. If you quote, link to your sources. This seems like a no brainer, but I see blogs using quotations all the time without showing readers where they came from. Even if it’s not a blog you’re quoting, a link to the source makes your posts look professional.

2. If a blog in your field posted about something before you, link to it. If a blog in your niche beats you to a story and you found out about it through their post, give them a “via” link. When a much larger blog posts about something before you do, link them in your post about it. Even if you didn’t actually find out about certain news items through other blogs, giving them a link still shows them respect and will put you in their good graces. This is very important if you ever want them to link you in the future.

3. If you quote or repost text, make it clear that you did not write it. You might think it’s cool to copy-paste 5 paragraphs from one of my blog posts and just post it with a tiny “via” link at the bottom of the post, but it’s not. Use quotation marks or the blockquote tag so everyone knows you didn’t write what you’re posting.

4. If a YouTube video has a blog url in its description, link that site. It usually means that the author of that blog made that video, so give him some credit! The fact that the video is embeddable through YouTube does not make it up for grabs.

5. Don’t quote an entire post. If you liked somebody else’s blog post, quote a portion of it. Copying and pasting an entire blog post is pretty lame, even if you do cite its source.