Plagiarism and Promotion: Ideas and Suggestions

by Michele Cameron Drew

Have you noticed that your page hits have dropped considerably? Have you wondered if your articles are being plagiarized? How you can create more traffic? My rant, with useful suggestions and additional reading list...


Although this article is somewhat a rant, it is designed to shed some light on some things that many of us are experiencing right now. The loss of page views and/or income and a lack of promotion ideas. This problem could be due to a number of things. Have you stopped promoting the urls of your articles? Older articles can be promoted in new ways to generate more hits(are you still using the same old social bookmarking?).

Newer articles still need to be promoted to maximize exposure, even when you have a current readership. The more crosslinks, backlinks and SEO links a page contains, the higher it will place in the search engines and the more hits you will see to your articles.

Do you have a niche? Have you tried joining communities, social networks and forums related to that niche? Posting articles and opinions or helping other users in forums related to your niche is a great way to promote yourself and your articles. What about your blog? Do you have a blog? This is a great way to gain more exposure.

How about a writers' group networking site, where you can all network and promote each others' work? Similar to a social bookmarking site, but more in-depth, this type of site could be utilized for sharing all kinds of useful ideas and information.

On another note, recently, due to my name being within the text of one of my articles, plugging my own poem, I came across something not so lovely. There is a person out on the web that has been stealing work from a multitude of triond writers. I'm sure there are many others plagiarizing, but this individual has nearly 300 articles. Although I haven't checked anywhere near all of them, I do recognize and have researched enough to know that at least 5% have been from triond and every single article that I checked was originally published here.

I ran a Google search on my name, which I do periodically. I have been doing this much more often since this realization. I came across my article "In Retrospect, the Blizzard of '78: 30 Years Later" posted under a different name with no byline and all of the links removed that relate back to me, including the poem "Starbird Hill" which inspired the writing of the article.

This person is highly active in promoting our articles all over the internet under his/her own website where they are copy/pasted verbatim and advertised using the second image in the article. They have changed the title, removed the byline and original links and used new tags, then pasted the text and images to their own website. This is plain and simple copyright infringement.

Today I have noted the fact that this person is using notsolong.com(similar to tinyurl), to shorten their urls and probably to disguise them, because they have realized that I am on to them, having been banned from several sites.

Every day I come across more links and every day I go to the social bookmarking website owners and ask to have this user banned from their respective systems. I have emailed triond and they assure me that they will be looking into this.

I will not provide the link to his/her website here, so as not to promote this person's site in any way, but I will provide you with the address of their profile on the social bookmarking sites that I have found who have not yet removed this user, at the time of this writing.

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