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I was plagiarized
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Hi Reader, Chet emailed in to say a guy plagiarized me on Medium. I was plagiarized. I wrote an article about comedian George Carlin’s odd note-taking system a while ago. The article went viral, and Medium paid me a few hundred dollars. (You can read my article here) A few days later, a plagiarizer copied my article into his Medium account. He changed the picture and republished it under his name. When I heard about it, I left him a snarky comment and moved on with my day. I used to worry a lot about plagiarism. That’s not the first time someone copied my work. I found a PDF of my writing books on a torrent site a few years ago. Dozens of sites have copied articles from my sites onto their own. Sometimes, I issue DMCA take-down requests, but I don’t worry much about plagiarism. You see… That article was part of a series of articles and content promoting my course about the Zettelkästen Method for Writers. I earned several thousand dollars and attracted some high-quality students from the launch. That ahem writer copying one of my articles is like taking a single piece from a jigsaw puzzle and passing it off as a finished work. If you’re creating content online and attracting any kind of audience, you’ll be ripped off at some point. It could be a human. Or it could be AI. You can waste hours getting angry. Or you can move on. Whatever you decide, here’s what’s far more valuable: The relationship between you and your audience. No one can copy that. Write on,
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Grow your business by writing online
Join 25,000 readers for daily insights about writing online and growing a profitable business. For writers, coaches and CEOs.
Hi Reader, I started my writing business back in 2014. In 2014… My writing blog was a fun side project. I also worked as an in-house copywriter for a SaaS company. I didn’t realize I’d started a writing business until 2016. I somehow stumbled into the world of display advertising and affiliate marketing. It didn’t happen at once, but… Even then… I didn’t march into my boss’s office and declare, “I quit!” until 2020. My writing business has gone up and down since I said: “I quit.” These days,...
Hi Reader, I’m running a Pro Writers Only workshop early next month. I usually deep dive into a single topic that helps amateur writers go pro. My next workshop is all about getting paid to write. There are many ways you can do it. Which one interests you the most? Offering coaching and consulting Selling courses Freelancing Selling books Tick the box for the topic you are most interested in. Tickets cost $97, but I’ll give away one to a poll respondent selected at random. Write on,Bryan Collins
Hi Reader, What are half of searchers doing after typing a term into Google? NOTHING. That’s according to a joint study by SEO companies SparkToro and Datos. Enter the world of zero-click search, where Google serves up content scraped from people’s sites and slaps it in front of readers without sending traffic in return. And get this: 30% of searchers who click are going to another Google-owned property, such as YouTube, Google Images, or Google News. As somebody who built a writing business...