Quoting News in your Blog

Some blogs are just running excerpts from news articles. These are generally worthless for marketing and have negative SEO value. We’ve written about duplicate content before, so we won’t go into that here. But there are times when you want to use part of a news article in your posts.

The first issue is permission. You can use a certain amount of text under “fair use” but you can’t quote the entire article or a huge segment without reprint rights. Often reprint rights are accessible – you just contact the paper via their web site about reprint rights and specify your reason and that it’s for a business blog, etc.

However, under “fair use”, you could probably reasonably quote a couple of paragraphs without a problem. We’re not giving a professional rule of thumb or legal advice about the length of a quotation – fair use is vague in the law – intentionally – so they can go after people selectively rather than evenly. But personally this writer will quote a couple of paragraphs at a time without incident.

Assuming you’re going to do that, for maximum SEO (search engine optimization), quote the piece in the context of your own post, article, or blog entry – with at least 100-200 words before and after. Examples are [here], [here], and [here].

If there’s enough of a lead-in, the article will be more likely to get treated as unique by google, even with the quotation in it. That way you actually get seo value out of it. Plus, it’s bad form to just slap a quotation on your site with nothing else – because visitors see it as lowering the value of your site – there’s nothing there they couldn’t have gotten elsewhere. Best practice is put quotations in the context of you making your own set of points.

Originality is king. If you see something in the news you just have to use, write a short (less than 500 words) article that’s the article that *you* would have written for the NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, or whatever, and include the quotation section in the middle of it, at the appropriate point. It’s fine to even take an article in a completely different direction than the original writer, because that’s precisely the point – borrowing the quotation but using it in the context of your own purposes and direction. You don’t want to represent it out of context, but you’re entitled to do more than just mimic someone else’s article – again added value is what’s important – don’t make it a rip off of someone else’s piece, because then they just don’t need your site – they can go to the source. Remember, search engines make the big internet small.

Lastly, you could include just a link to another article, with a few comments, but that’s bad form. It sends people off site without good cause. Plus – just a link, by itself, can lower SEO (you’re giving away juice). Instead, put a link to the original article in the quotation source. Like this:

Mr. Elienberg wasn’t a Comcast employee, but a so-called independent contractor working for a separate company. This month, he sued both companies, for allegedly depriving him and other contractors of overtime pay and benefits by not considering them employees.The case highlights a perennial issue for employers that is gaining new prominence during the recession. Lawyers say employers are trying to avoid hiring full-time employees by tapping contractors, as workers seeking better pay and benefits turn to the courts. – [Wall Street Journal, Oct 19, 2009]

Besides, chances are the link is going to break at some point, when the source site overhauls their site, removes the article, or starts charging for it. Block quotes are nice, by the way: no need for quote marks or italics with a block quote, and it’s appropriate for quoting in extenso and for visually displaying the quotation in a more interesting way.

That’s it. Use quotations and links judiciously, be original, don’t duplicate other sites wholesale (it’s getting you nowhere and ruining your SEO), and don’t quote our of context, but do use visual styling, and do express your own ideas in your posts. Market Moose provides consulting on internet marketing strategy to small businesses.

Why Blog?

In the olden days (2-3 years ago, by internet standards), we all rushed to build web sites of the static variety. They had the usual things – a Contact page, an FAQ, an order form…

These days, static sites are getting wiped off the search engine rankings by sites with dynamic content – sites that are updated frequently – most especially, blogs.

Blogging tools require no special knowledge. If you can write an e-mail, you can write a blog post. The hurdle is not how, it’s the will to do it. The keys to the will in this case are several:

First: you have to accept the fact that the old days are gone, and putting up an internet billboard and just waiting for people to come to you is like fishing in your backyard swimming pool. Invest and hope nets very few fish. In other words, you can make no progress, unless you accept that the world really has changed. Has changed. Past tense. If you cannot get past this point, you will be stuck, like Willy Loman, in Death of a Salesman, relying on a handshake in an era that has long since gone by. The hunger, the craving for fresh content has made static sites seem like reading the same newspaper every morning at breakfast – it just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Second: you have to accept the fact that other people truly are making hay with dynamic content – with blogs. This amounts to accepting that, by providing consistently fresh content, people elsewhere are driving business traffic and drawing in new customers. In other words, you must not dismiss as irrelevant the news that quite ordinary people (almost exclusively ordinary people) are using the internet to effectively market and grow their businesses. If you maintain disbelief here, you cannot hope to use the internet effectively yourself. While this may be comforting, because it demands no further activity, and it may compel you to throw money at experts like ourselves, and hope that’s enough, you’re not truly committed to marketing your business, beyond dropping flyers from a helicopter into the internet. The returns will be commensurate with the strategy.

Third: you must accept that blogging was invented so that people with no technical knowledge or background, and no skill in web building, could post content as easily as writing an e-mail. In other words, you have to resign yourself to the fact that it’s stoltifyingly easy. If you maintain the myth that internet marketing is for experts, you will certainly alleviate yourself of any felt responsibility for marketing your business, and you will also alleviate your prospects of any interest in your marketing efforts. They will find those enterprising persons in point two (above) who have no more knowledge or skill or talent or expertise than you, but only have slightly more courage and clarity. They will find those with the will.

Yes, we’re being quite frank, here. That’s one of the keys to our success. We’ll tell you the truth, when others demur. We’ll be straight with you, where others offer you Camelot for the price of swamp land, and sell you swamp land at Camelot prices. One of the reasons we have loyal clients is our willingness to push back, to say the hard thing, to nudge you into the next phase in your marketing success.

Finally: if you have truly accepted the reality of the situation, you must make a decision about whether your business is worth the five minutes a day it will take you to maintain an interesting blog. If not, then you must accept the results of the first three points:

• a marketing strategy from internet past, not internet present
• a marketing strategy that discourages today’s hottest sources of prospects
• a marketing strategy that is less than ordinary, and requires no ongoing effort

On the other hand, if you are willing to update your marketing strategy, willing to attract the prospects you aren’t currently attracting, and willing to spend 5min/day or so being fairly ordinary to accomplish these, then blogging can become the beating heart of a business marketing plan that is able to unlock a host of marketing tools, like:

• powerful social networking
• effective e-mail marketing
• enhanced search engine results

It’s largely up to you. We can build your site, and we can help with your branding, style, content, navigation, lead capture, search engine optimization, and more.

From there, we can advise you on how to make that 5min/day really count for your business. If you want to reach the next step after launching a site you can be proud of, blogging is an important starting place. Remember:

A business that isn’t growing, is dying.

A business that isn’t marketing, is shrinking, not growing.

and lastly:

You Mean You’re Not Blogging?

You’re throwing opportunities away. According to Digital Inspiration, Blogs rate higher on Google than Newspapers or Magazines. Why do you think most major news services have added blogs to their sites? They’re trying not to lose their audiences. Blogs capture web traffic. In fact, one acronym for BLOG is Better Listing On Google! Remember, most people don’t search by company name, unless they’re already your clients. You want to capture people looking at real estate issues, or whatever else your site is about.

It can be hard to believe, at first, that it helps. Someone asked, recently, “You mean people read blogs and then call you?” Yes, that’s one way. Blogs help search engines find and rank your site higher. You get high plusses for unique, original, relevant, and frequently updated content. People whose sites never change, start sinking in the rankings of key searches. You will come up in more searches (it’s not just about rankings), which means more people find your site when searching for relevant information and discussion. Eventually, a readership develops. If you rarely update your blog, of course, you’ll never experience these benefits. It’s like owning a neon sign and never turning on the power. It’s hard for people of my generation to believe that things work this way now, but they do. That’s why most major companies and organizations have turned to blogging, and often run a number of blogs that draw attention to their services.

I’m not technical!: Neither is blogging. Blogging is no harder. and not very different, than sending an e-mail. It’s type and save. For many people, blogging has not been tried and found too hard, it’s simply not been tried, because there’s not enough belief in increasing your business. But if that’s not you, it takes about 10 minutes a day for a consistent time to make an impact. What are you waiting for?

The Keys to Blogging Well are:
Consistency: Blog 10-minutes a day. If you absolutely can’t, then blog every other day. If every 3rd day is all you can do, it’s all you can do. But putting up a blog you intent to update once a month is just going to frustrate visitors who expect to see something new from you.
Relevancy: It’s all well and good to blog about your cats. But relevancy scores big with search engines and with clients. Blog about the local market, your industry, financial issues, advice for buyers/sellers/borrowers/homeowners. Blog what you think about, what you know, what’s on your mind and, if you do that consistently, you’ll attract other people who are thinking about it too.
Uniqueness: Don’t copy and paste other people’s content into your blog. For one thing, that’s stealing, and other businesses tend to take a dim view. For another, search engines penalize you for duplicate content, so you’re just wasting space and making it worse. You don’t have to be hemingway to write a paragraph on what’s frustrating about the market right now, or answering a question that you were asked today, or explaining why a certain kind of mortgage is better than another, or discussing whether it’s a good time to buy, a good time to sell, or both. Maybe you write just to give hope. But for goodness sake, if you can answer a question on the telephone, you can write down what you said on your blog. Work it!

That’s it. You can google search business blogs, blog growth, blogs and search engine rankings, and any number of other phrases to see what’s going on. It’s like health – it’s not about whether we know what’s good for us; it’s whether we have the will. In fact, this is about the health of your business.

Site Owners – the World has Spun

2-3 years ago (forever, in internet time), it was enough to have a few pages about your company. If you had a web site at all, the novelty of it might send you some leads.

What’s changed?

Marketing, for one thing. People aren’t interested in hearing about you (or me). That’s right, I said it. People are interested in what they’re interested in. What the internet, specifically the web, has done, is to cut out most of the traditional middle man opportunities. People have direct access to an unthinkable vast database of pretty much whatever they’re interested in. We either pitch to that, or we’re pitching to the wind. Web sites that go on and on about my company, myself, my favorite color, are too narcissistic for a web 2.0 marketing environment. They won’t just fade away, they’ll plummet in terms of rankings, leads, and attention. Sure, one can pull off a temporary boost with a gimmick or two tucked behind the code, but Google is getting smarter, and it’s web crawlers are reading your site just like a human would, moreso every day, and reacting to the irrelevant content and the fancy tricks just as much as to the content.

The other thing that’s changed is that no one gives a hoot about static web sites anymore. Again, yes, I said it. No one cares about our 5-page treatise that never changes. If we want static data, we’ll get it on an mp3 and listen to it in the car, or from a keychain-sized pocket device. The words, “I won’t blog. I just won’t.” are the death knell of small business sites that intend to have any effect these days. It’s all about dynamic content. And not cut and paste content that’s ripped off from elsewhere – besides sending your google rank plummeting, it’ll just bore your prospects off to your competitors. What people want, whether we like it or not, wish it away or not, is something that’s going to take work from the site owner – those actually involved in the business operations: visitors want original, relevant, frequently-updated content. Google wants the same thing.

So don’t spend 16 hours this weekend hanging flyers, at 1% rate of return. Spend 5min/day, every day, keeping your blog current. A little dab’ll do ya, as they say. It really just takes 5minutes. This post is 10minutes, and already you’re probably getting bored, right? So to sum it up. It’s not the amount of work that matters, or that you and I really care about. It’s the kind of work. If we’re still basically using yesterday’s marketing techniques, face it – we’re old. And the only cure isn’t more cowbell – it’s to update our technique. Get a new hair cut from the barber, buy a different kind of shirt than you normally wear, eat something you never have, and think outside the box that is your web site,  your marketing plan, and any self-imposed limits on your business growth. If we want traffic from outside the box, leads from outside the lines, qualified visitors from beyond the “about us” page, then business owners have to change the way they work, when it comes to their marketing. We’ll have to settle for spending less money than interest, less time than focus, and we’ll have to learn a new thing.

Now if that isn’t motivation enough to get started, leave a comment here, and I’ll try harder. You and I are like our businesses: if we’re not growing, we’re dying.

Oh, and one last thing. Yeah, I know I was born with a circuit board in my mouth. But that’s no excuse. If you can read this, and you write a reasonably comprehensible e-mail, you’ve got the basic tools you need to market your business for years to come. You and I may not have gone to school for this. Marketing can be fun, frankly, once we get past the curmudgeonly resistance that comes with the onset of years. So take a pill from me – contact me if you want some help kicking it off – meanwhile, it’s your 5minutes to think about your business growth. How are you spending it today?