Guest Blog from James Daniel of EarthMonkey Creative Media!

Don’t steal Mazuma’s web copy – or anyone else’s!

Hello, and sorry for not being Lucy. But she’s asked me (as a copywriter) to throw my tuppence in, cos right now Mazuma is suffering a torrent of copycat writers – a gang of brazen hussies who’ve stolen the copy from the Mazuma website and pasted it (keywords and all) into their own humble pages.

OK, I guess Mazuma deserve some acclaim for being the target of choice for the scummy accountancy underclass. But you have to wonder who’d pull a scam like this – and what else would they happily swipe?

Would they copy and paste someone’s tax return and hope no-one notices that?

Who knows – but clearly these people are too daft to fulfil the business they’re trying to siphon off!

So why is this such a bad idea? Well here’s half a dozen good reasons:

1.Your copy is the voice of your business – an expression of your brand - and someone else’s copy will sound like them. NOT YOU!

2.You won’t get away with it – like Mazuma, any website owner will spot you in an instant and get their legal bods on the case. Then like the dimwits in question, you’ll face the trauma of your website going offline...

3.You’re adding to your workload. After the strenuous task of nicking someone else’s content, you’ll have to write something original before your site can re-launch!

4.Google hates duplicate content: they’re unlikely to penalise the original source, but they’ll probably omit your site from the search results.

5.If you do a straight cut & paste job, you could be pasting internal links from the original site – so you might end up sending traffic back to the site you’re ripping off!!

6.When (not if) your website is taken offline, you drop off Google’s radar – and that means climbing the greasy pole all over again. (Game over?)

So - all things considered, it’s not a great idea to use someone else’s content! Better to write your own...and if you’re stuck for ideas, I know a great course on writing for the web!

James Daniel is a copywriter and MD of EarthMonkey Creative Media. In his spare time he co-runs training events in South Wales for non-techie people who want to learn search engine optimisation.