Bloggers resort to someone else's ideas for various reasons. Sometimes, they can't find fresh news for their content and sometimes they feel under pressure of publishing their posts according to a certain schedule. But no matter why they decide to do it, plagiarism can be extremely harmful to their blog. Why so? Let's figure it out!
First of all, it's bad for SEO as websites are punished by search engines for having plagiarized content. Chances are some of your URLs will disappear from search results because of posting duplicate content. Consequently, your blog will lose its position in the ranking. What's more, you may get legal penalties for plagiarism.
Using someone else's content may kill your reputation. Integrity is one of the fundamental values in our society, so copied ideas won't be appreciated by others. Besides, plagiarism demonstrates to you readers that you don't have any self-respect.
And last but not least, there is no chance for you to polish your skills if you don't create original content. Writing unique articles helps you learn how to do thorough research and organize your thoughts. You are losing the opportunity to master your skills if you just copy-paste texts on your blog.
Now that you realize how important it is to avoid plagiarism, you are probably wondering how to do it. If yes, keep reading the article!
7 Blogging Tips on How to Avoid Plagiarism in Content Writing
1. Take sufficient time
To create high-quality content, you need a great amount of time. It's impossible to produce original ideas when you feel pressured by the deadlines you've set for yourself. Hence, take your time to work on an article. Find a slot in your schedule and devote yourself to the writing process only. If you have at least a few hours for content creation, you can find necessary sources of information, organize your thoughts, properly structure the materials and check your work for unintentional plagiarism.
2. Read as much as possible
If you use only one source to compose your article, the probability of plagiarism increases. Your ideas are likely to be limited if you are not reading the information provided by different experts. To avoid this, research as many sources as you can. This will deepen your understanding of the subject and enable you to combine various opinions. This way, you'll be able to work out your own original ideas, which will also make your articles more comprehensive and useful for the readers.
3. Use plagiarism checker tools
Even if you create an article on your own, there is still a chance that it might be similar to others' works. You might face unintentional plagiarism, so you should be really careful with that. To figure out if it's your case, you can use a free plagiarism detector available on the web. Just like students use a plagiarism checker for assignments, you should use the one for your blog posts. Once it has your text scanned, you can see what parts of it must be modified. Note that this check for uniqueness is a must for each piece of content you are going to publish.
4. Learn to paraphrase
Paraphrasing is one of the easiest ways to prevent plagiarism in blog writing. All you need is just to find information that perfectly matches your topic and use it as a basis for your article. Note that great paraphrase is possible only if you find the ideas clear and deeply understand the information. If so, you can rewrite them and present the message in your own words.
5. Make screenshots
Sometimes it's really impossible to paraphrase the text. For example, when you need to publish codes of a program or some standard forms. So what to do in this case? The solution is pretty easy: you can screenshot the information and upload it in an image format on your blog. Since search engines cannot read images, you'll avoid plagiarism. However, you must know that posting too many screenshots may negatively affect the ranking of your website. Besides, images usually slow down the loading speed of your blog.
6. Quote and cite
If you cannot paraphrase original text sources, this requires you to quote or cite them. As you already know, copying pieces of content is dangerous for your blog. However, if you are using copied information in the quotation marks, it will not be considered as plagiarism. Importantly, you have to mention the sources you've used in your post.
7. Develop creativity
Creativity is crucial for generating original content. You must be able to think out of the box if you want to create articles that are not similar to others' posts. Therefore, while working on your own blog, you should consistently develop your creative thinking. There are a lot of tips and tricks on how to do it, so find those that you consider the most effective for yourself and start mastering your creative skills as soon as possible.
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