Will Your Site Be Shut Down Next?

Make this costly mistake at your peril….

I’ve become increasingly aware of affiliates, primarily new Affiliate marketers, who risk having their affiliate and Clickbank accounts closed, and worse, their entire sites shut down.

What are these affiliates doing?

Well, instead of writing their own content or spending a few bucks on PLR articles, they’re publishing content and pictures on their web sites and blogs that doesn’t rightfully belong to them – which constitutes a copyright violation.

I’ve personally discovered and dealt with copyright infringers who’ve used my articles without permission, copied my sales page in its entirety, posted whole copies of my newsletter to their sites, stolen graphics for which I owned the licence, and used a picture of me over a testimonial for a product which I knew nothing about.

Lucky affiliates are asked to remove the offending material, which lets them to learn from their ‘mistake’ and keep earning revenue from their site.

However, the problem has become so prevelant, that I and other publishers of original content who hate wasting time waiting for webmasters to remove pages from their sites, simply bypass that step and have their affiliate accounts closed by the merchant or their site shut down by their ISP.

For example, some affiliates apparently believe that they’ll make more sales if they simply copy a merchant’s sales page in its entirety to their own site.

You and I know that this type of thinking is idiotic, especially when the affiliate link sends the visitor to a merchant’s homepage which is identical to the one that they just read.

Not only does this duplication result in far fewer sales, but the affiliate risks having their site penalized as ‘duplicate content’ by Google. Moreover, it’s ample justification for affiliate or Clickbank account termination. ISP’s, which are bound by the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and Clickbank representatives are swift to shut down the abusers.

What about blog content syndication?

Syndicating other’s content is usually done for the purpose of increasing the amount of site content, linking out to reputable sites and thereby improving their PageRank and search engine rankings.

There are widgets that make it easy for affiliates to syndicate other webmasters’ blog content on your own blog, but just because one can do this however, doesn’t mean that one should.

Whether you use a widget or cut and paste the content into your site, using another author’s content becomes an issue when whole posts are copied. The ‘issue’ becomes even more problematic when the link to the original post is stripped out and no credit is given to the author.

The right way to use another webmaster’s blog content is to write your own post on that topic, cite the other author’s work by including a sentence or two of their post and then link back to their post using their trackback link.

Your post may then be picked up and included in the Comments section of the post you cited, which is a far more valuable way to earn a link back to your site.

The bottom line is that you need to make sure that you have permission to use other author’s content and pictures on your site.

I also recommend that if you don’t like to write, instead of ‘beefing up’ your site with other webmasters’ articles, invest in some private label rights articles to post to your blog.

It’s a very low-cost option for increasing the content on your site and you won’t risk copyright infringement and all the hard work that you’ve done to build your site.

Need Content?

My most HIGHLY recommended PLR (private label rights) site is Alice Seba and Mila Sidman’s All Private Label Content service. In addition to offering exceptionally high quality PLR articles in 26 niche topics at very reasonable prices, they also give you ane-month complimentary access to their private members-only forum and a list of suggested affiliate programs to monetize your articles.

1. All Health Content
2. Teen Article Bundle
3. Gardening Article Bundle
4. Business Idea Article Bundle
5. Finance & Credit Article Bundle
6. Organic Food Article Bundle
7. Self Improvement Article Bundle
8. Home Decor Article Bundle
9. WAHM Article Bundle
10. Natural Parenting Article Bundle
11. All Mom Content
12. Herbs Article Bundle
13. Menopause Article Bundle
14. Internet Marketing Bundle
15. Empowered Moms Research Bundle
16. Kid Fun & Parent Sanity Research Bundle
17. Men’s Health Article Bundle
18. Family Travel Article Bundle
19. Natural Cleaning Article Bundle
20. Exercise & Fitness Research Bundle
21. Weight Loss Research Bundle
22. Online Marketing Research Bundle
23. Real Estate Article Bundle
24. Back to School Research Bundle
25. Web Design Research Bundle
26. Women’s Beauty & Fashion Research Bundle

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