Do you want to grow a profitable content business? If so, join 25,000 readers. I share daily insights about personal brand building, writing online and growing a profitable business. It's for creators, coaches and business owners.
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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Letters From the Desk of Bryan Collins
Do you want to grow a profitable content business? If so, join 25,000 readers. I share daily insights about personal brand building, writing online and growing a profitable business. It's for creators, coaches and business owners.
I’ve spent thousands on business masterminds over the years. I’ve paid for online and in-person masterminds. Online masterminds are convenient. You can join the weekly accountability calls and check-ins on your lunch break or at night. But I find all those weekly Zoom calls and live cohorts exhausting. It’s also hard to get value from a program where you must wait your turn to ask the facilitator a question. I’ve sometimes paid more to circumvent that problem and get 1:1 time with the...
Over the years, I’ve started and stopped a few Substack publications. I even interviewed co-founder Hamish McKenzie for my podcast. For a while, I figured Substack was more suitable for journalists and politics bloggers. Now, I’m more bullish on the platform than ever. I love reading stats about how other creators are finding success on it. I recently read a report from Ciler Demiralp of The Newsletter Circle. Her team analyzed 75,000 Substack publications. Here are a few findings that stood...
Short one today… If you want to build a relationship with readers and followers, try these 21 tactics: Write and send a daily email. Readers will expect to hear from you. Share a recent win…or a loss (people love the losses more than the wins) Ask a new subscriber, “What are you working on?” Describe your morning or evening routine. Offer up a contrarian take on a topic like AI. My take? Write what AI can’t. Write about something you learned or discovered. Include a photo of yourself, not...