To do well in any online marketing program, I have constantly expressed to clients as well as prospective clients that unique content is extremely important.

Some people I meet start working on ways to turn this task into a more productive and less onerous task for themselves by considering ways to leverage other people's ideas.  What I've always told people is that plagiarism on the internet is considered a no-no and can be penalized in a number of ways including getting your website blocked from listing well as well as prospective legal ramifications which are becoming more prevalent these days.

Yesterday, Anton Vickerman was convicted on two counts of copyright infringement by linking to copyright materials and illegal content in the form of copyrighted media.  Some interesting questions do prevail as Anton Vickerman made a lot of money on advertising around valuable media content.  While often many others are not making money from the links, even if the content is not hosted at your website as most YouTUBE and other videos are not, it's important to assure that the content is open for sharing versus copyrighted materials.

In most cases, a link to another article or YouTUBE results in credit to the other party hosting the content.  For most small business people, a link is a compliment to introduce content we appreciate in some way. 

A lot of people ask me about copying content and providing a reference to the source elsewhere on the internet.  From this recent court case, I continue to agree that this is not acceptable as there starts to become a financial / marketing benefit to the website owner even if a reference to the original source is provided.

Some great ways to work with content you truly appreciate include writing your own opinions or perspective on the topic or idea but reference some well-written content on the subject using an outbound link to their content so the owner gets the benefit of your link.  In this way, as website owners, we achieve a number of online goals:

1. We continue to develop our communication or voice - brand.
2. We add our own thoughts to topics making us relevant to follow which is one of our primary online marketing goals.
3. We play respectfully on the internet and give credit to other deserving content producers making us valuable content producers as well.  We become shareable so our reach can be expanded by others looking to appreciate our work.

Our online marketing promotion reach expands when we create unique content because people will link to unique content.  We do ourselves a disservice when we do otherwise.  And, more than that, we also stay out legal trouble.

Let's do ourselves a huge service and get further with our online promotions.  Build our own brands instead of shortcutting and leveraging other people's content which gets us little to nothing - or worse.