Industry veterans have always stressed that a newsletter should have the highest quality content, which is true. But sometimes they forget to mention that simply having quality content isn’t enough – it needs to be original. People assume that just because newsletters aren’t reliant on search engines that they can get away with plagiarizing content from other people. It’s true that Google algorithm changes and penalties are not a concern if you’re just scraping content for use on newsletters, but it’s not completely risk-free for your business.
For starters, just because you’re not on Google’s radar doesn’t mean you’re not going to get caught by the owner of the content you’ve stolen. Newsletters get shared all the time and there’s also the possibility that the author of the content you’ve scraped is your subscriber. Do not think that there’s nothing he can do against you in such a case. Remember that reputation is very, very important in the business. Yours could suffer a great deal if word gets out that you’ve been stealing content.
On the other hand, writing original content for your newsletter provides benefits outside of keeping your proverbial nose clean. First, it hones your skill in writing. Nothing bad ever comes out of improving in any skill. Next, people remember original and high quality content. Produce enough of them and people will start seeing you as an authority on your niche. Being considered as an authority in your niche is priceless and will do wonders for your business.
Avoiding Problems with Unoriginal Content: Curating, Not Scraping
It’s understandable if you don’t always have time to craft original content. After all, high quality original content – the kind that you need for an effective newsletter – isn’t always something that you can create at speeds that would be consistent enough for a regular newsletter. It’s perfectly fine to get content from somewhere else, but in order to avoid problems, you need to learn the difference between curating and scraping.
Scraping is when you simply swipe content from other sources and use it for your own. This is bad and should be avoided. The benefits at best are short term. Curating, on the other hand, differs because instead of just sending out copies of someone else’s content, you get the original author’s consent, you provide a short introduction or description of the content, and you properly cite and credit your sources.
Write a New Article Based on the Source, Don’t Reword
One of the more common mistakes among content creators these days is the notion that it isn’t plagiarism if you reword the article enough to pass side-by-side text comparison. It’s true that if done well enough, it will not be seen as plagiarism at first glance. But people who read both the original and your reworded copy will instantly recognize your article as a rip-off. You want to avoid this.
The real trick – or proper approach – is to digest the original article completely so that you can gain full understanding of the topic, and maybe read a little bit so that you can add something else to the original content. Then write a new article based on the stock knowledge that you have gained. If you ever need to restate an idea from the original article verbatim, cite the source and credit the author.
Conclusion
The truth is that using original content in your newsletter is important because it prevents you from missing the forest for the trees. Using plagiarized content isn’t just dangerous because there’s a chance that you can get caught – it’s dangerous because it encourages laziness and stunts your growth. And when it comes to any business, failure to progress or grow is a surefire way to fail.
