Hi, I see one of the forum members has some sample articles on her site and was wondering if I should do the same. It seems slightly risky, what if someone steals the article? Also, do you recommend having a site that is dedicated to samples of your freelance writing? I have a writing site but it's mostly about creative writing. Thanks for the advice that I've picked up so far on the forum.
That point gets batted back and forth here pretty often. I do have some samples but they're so specific to a product. Articles would be easier to swipe. But you could link to ones you've posted on ezine or other articles sites. They are already public domain. And you could have a contact form so people could request writing samples. And put copyscape on there. I would recommend a dedicated site or area of your site for freelance writing.
Thanks Webgal, I do have some articles published on ezine so will link to them, will also follow other advice.
just put up a copyright. it should be adhered to like any other copyrighted material. check your article copy in google every once in a while and if it appears on another site, get in touch with those mofo's!
I got the simplest way to secure your creativity. Just make a screen shot of the whole article and watermark it with your name. Remember to have the watermark in the middle of the screenshot so that is is difficult to remove it. Now post that screen shot on your website/blog as an sample and mention anywhere your sample that this method has been done to prevent other from steeling out samples. , Hope this way works. Regards, World_Peace
Yes, will probably publish a few articles that are for sale as you suggest, Matt, and take my chances with them being stolen. Have started my new freelance writing venture by publishing an article about article writing, rather than an actual article, and have published it on my existing Really creative writing site rather than on a dedicated site, which was one of Webgal's suggestions. World Peace, it's a good idea to take a screenshot of an article and copyright the screenshot. The problem is, I have an OCR program which can convert words in a screenshot into editable text, and I'm sure others have a similar program, so it isn't completely theft-proof (I use it to convert old newspaper articles which are long out of copyright into text, for an old world news site that I have.) It's still a good idea, though.
Not long ago I read a number of recommendations elsewhere (not sure where for exact citation) but summarizing: Add meta tags at the head of your document and repeat them at the very end to prevent cache'ing There is also a bit of javascript to prevent Mozilla-based browser to store pages in cache as the above is for IE Encrypt your page on the fly with a PHP or cgi script whenever is possible or do it the hard way with an encrypting software Do not forget the old-time javascripts tricks to prevent right click but do not add "copyright blah, blah" in the warning message as you will encouraging trying another stealing methods There are also a number of onClick events that once added to the body tag prevent copy, paste, cut and save as as a bit of coding to clear the content of the clipboard (this raises a visual alert in Vista) With all the above you are steal in risk to get your content stolen so make it harder by displaying your articles as a photoshop images. People is lazy to retype. Protect that image behind a flash screen or make your articles in Flash even harder to get them retyped or download, but there are flash grabbers and if cache is not properly cleared the content is into the surfer's trashcan. Remember that flash content cannot be read by search engines so it will not be indexed reducing at a time the chance to be stolen. As per the sample site, it must be a good idea since my hubby is planning to offer free space for puting up online exclusively sample content as the domain has the word "samples" as part of it