Scoble Wants You to Steal His Content
Ever the maverick Robert Scoble is openly asking anyone and everyone to steal his content. Give him credit for or don’t he doesn’t care, well sort of. In a post that is refreshing to us that think sharing is better Scoble nails it on the head with his thoughts; ‘I’ve found that the more I give away my content, the more magical stuff happens to me anyway’ this is something we tell our clients; post your content often and for everyone.
As a frequent poster to Flickr I started off with all rights reserved on my images but as requests came in to use some of my photos I changed it to Creative Commons. Since then my photos have been used in various sites such the Houstonist, the Torontoist and on Wikipedia to name a few. Have I gotten paid for any of these? No but that’s not why I do it. The reason is exposure and isn’t that why we have websites? As Scoble points out the New York Times recently caved to the lack of traffic and offered their premium services for free their traffic is ‘going through the roof.’ Quite simply no one wanted to pay for it and they lost exposure. Does this work into their immediate business model? Probably not but it does help them out in the long run. If people can see what they want when they want they will come back. The biggest factor for sites such as NY Times is trust, in fact every site needs to promote trust. If users look to your site as the go to site in your market you will always do better than your competitor.
Sometimes this isn’t a viable avenue for everyone but when you can share and share a like, most people will give you credit. This could be in the form of a link back to your site such as here under Author. I didn’t get paid for this link, or pay for it but it is a link back to me and there are two currencies on the net; money and links so any good link you can get back to your site is great.
Sharing your content with others will only gain you more exposure and exposure is what keeps us in business.
Even if you are giving it away
For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com