long hair brunette women
Guest Post by Sandra Miller

After investing that much time and effort in creating fresh, interesting and completely unique content for your blog, it would be best to also make sure your posts are protected from being stolen by other blogs or websites without properly crediting you. Plagiarism is a big problem on the Internet and search engines, particularly Google, are doing everything in their power to put their control over it, so their users can receive only the best and most useful results when searching their queries. If you were wandering what you can do to protect the content on your blog from being plagiarized, here are few tips to get you started:

Add a personal touch to your writing.

You can make your content even more unique and original by adding a personal flavor to it, sharing some personal examples or experiences to back up the factual information included in your blog posts or mentioning unique things that happened to you. Make your posts more about you and your blog, your passions and interests, and the plagiarists won't be able to copy and steal your work that easy. For example, write a post about how you designed your blog, but describe your personal story, include pictures and share the problems you've encountered to make it harder for plagiarizing.

Look for things that boost your creativity and use it when writing your posts.

Before you write your first sentence think about the topic and write down your thoughts and creative ideas. One of the most important things is that your writing is completely original and yours because readers aren't interested in reading something they've already seen somewhere else. Instead of copying other people's work, take different ideas, mix the sources, extract the facts and put your own experience in the context presenting fresh views and ideas.

If possible, avoid writing short blog posts.

Plagiarists are less likely to replicate a lengthy article that reaches 1000 words count or more, so in order to protect your work from plagiarism it is recommended that you make it a habit to more often write longer posts for your blog.

Always check your content on plagiarism checker.

Before publishing check the originality of your writing on plagiarism checker. Upload the text file or copy the content in the box and after scanning the unique checking algorithm will deliver you a plagiarism report with highlighted used sources and copied sentences. It is a great tool that you can also use if you have other writers creating content for your blog to ensure their writing is completely original.

Copyright the content on your blog.

According to copyright laws your blog content is protected the moment it is published, but you can also mention at the bottom of each page that all original content is copyrighted by you, adding in the year you started your blog and the current year. This is more than enough to show potential stealers how you feel about plagiarism. If you want to go further, you can register your blog with the U.S. Copyright Office, create a Creative Commons license, or even a separate page on your blog just for your copyright notice, but you don't actually need to do all that.

Leave watermarks on your images.

If you use your own photos on your blog that you don't want any other blog or website to use, you can consider leaving a watermark on them with your blog name or address on the top of the photos. This is great if you are linked to websites like Flickr or PhotoBucket which people usually use to search for images. Adding watermarks is easily done in any photo editor; just don't forget to choose the option medium to high 'dpi' before saving the image to preserve the quality of the picture.

Disable the right-click function for your blog images.

If you are using WordPress blog platform you can prevent your visitors from using the right-click function to download your photos or content with their CopyProtect plug-in, but you should also know that this way your readers won't be able to use your html coding for your button.

Embed 'Protected-by' badges and Copyright-proof plugins on your blog.

With these plugins and badges you are certified as the original owner of the copyrights of all your blog content, clearly showing the potential plagiarists that if they copy your content you will take the required actions against them.

Regularly monitor your blog content on duplicate content checker PlagSpotter.

If you enter the URL of the webpage you want to check in PlagSpotter's search box, the software will scan the content and deliver a report including its duplicates. You can also regularly monitor your web pages and get immediately informed if someone copied and used your content on other blogs or websites. This is truly an effective tool for protecting your blog content.

Contact the plagiarists.

If your blog content has been stolen, contact the stealing website through email providing all the needed information to show that your blog is copy protected and to proof the content has been plagiarized. Ask them to either credit you properly linking back to your blog, or to remove the copied post from their website.

Blogging is about exploring your creativity, so explore, go research the topic, put your personality into your writing – this way you'll best protect your blog from plagiarism.

Sandra Miller is a freelance writer from Brooklyn, loves writing social media tips. You can reach her at Google+