Ethical Blogging

When you start your own blog, you’ll begin to realize that interacting with the ‘blogosphere’ is implemental in, and critical to, your success. You might be looking for blogs to leave comments on in an attempt to drive traffic to your blog or to gain backlinks. Maybe you’re searching the community for a guest poster to help generate content on your blog. You might even just need some advice on where to start and where to go with your blog.

Many bloggers find themselves in such a hurry to start making money and be considered successful that they start to enact some less-than-ethical practices along the way. There are bloggers that will steal content from new blogs and hope they get indexed by Google first. There are bloggers that steal content and adapt it slightly for their own blog. There are people that will spam every blog they can find in an attempt to get a million backlinks in a day or two. While these methods might be useful to start, they will kill you in the long run.

In business, both online and off, reputation is everything. I can never stress this enough. Spamming blogs might get you a few backlinks, but what about the fact that you’ll now be considered a spammer, reducing the quality of your blog and resulting in you being shunned from the community? If you’re thinking, “Big deal!” you need to reread the first paragraph and see how this is a bad thing.

In the blogging community we work as a team and help each other achieve success. It’s a mutual relationship that exists in the blogosphere. Those that violate this sacred relationship will find trouble at every corner. Let’s imagine that your IP Address hits a spam database, or even your blog itself rather than just your personal IP!

What if people start to dislike you and now you’ll never get the benefit of mutual comments or link exchanges or even guest posters? If you rip off those providing services like SEO or Content Creation, you’ll likely never find anyone to work for you again. Better yet, you’ll probably also find yourself banned from the top webmaster forums which are extremely valuable resources.

So now that we’ve established why being an ethical blogger is important, let’s take a look at what you can do to be one:

1. Never steal content. Not even bits and pieces. If you decide to use something, provide a link back to the original source.

2. Work hard to network with other people in the webmaster community and establish good terms and relationships with as many people as possible. This will pay off big time now and in the future.

3. Spamming any forums or blogs is definitely a no-no.  The negative repercussions could follow you for years.

4. Understand that life is a give and take process. If you give someone something, you will most likely receive something in return. For example, try commenting on someone’s blog and asking them to return the favor. Personally, if I see that someone posted a comment on my blog I will try and leave one on theirs as well.

5. When you do leave comments, read the actual article or post before hand! Don’t just write something generic like, “Great post! Thanks.” because this is the equivalent of posting nothing at all –  or better yet, it can be seen as spamming.

6. Accepting money in exchange for a post or review on your blog usually isn’t a good idea unless you’re well established and ensure the reader understands that you were compensated for the post. Trying to work in paid posts with your genuine content will shy away many visitors.

7. Act in a respectful and professional manner if exposed to criticism or even an argument. Flaming or defaming another person could trash your own reputation as well.

8. Never write a post and claim your assumptions or speculation as fact. If you’re writing about your opinion on something, make sure it is clear that it is your opinion and not proven data. If you’re writing an article on something that requires research, don’t guess or just write anything. Perform the research and maintain the quality of the information you are distributing.

9. If you write about any controversial issues ensure that you do not personally attack anyone or attempt to defame their character. Be honest, but try not to drag their personal life or actions onto the stage. Use judgment and remember the golden rule, “Treat others as you would like to be treated.”

10. Never purchase any blog commenting services. Usually these will be spam and will incur the negative effects mentioned above.

11. Maintain a positive and courteous attitude. Don’t say anything at all if you have nothing nice to say.

That’s all for now! Do you have something you feel should be added to the list? Let me know by leaving a comment below.