Flaunt Your Sources Proudly on Your Blog, or Come Off Like a Scammer

Flaunt Your Sources Proudly on Your Blog, or Come Off Like a Scammer

There are plenty of blogs out there with bad information on them. One of the ways that these blogs get away with publishing bad information is by failing to cite sources and, when they do cite sources, by quote mining. If you have good sources, you should flaunt them on your blog properly so that everybody can see that you actually do your research before you say something.

If you’re using a blog for business purposes or personal purposes, one of your goals is going to be establishing yourself as somebody worth listening to or, as the case may be, reading. Oftentimes, what defines a real expert is the ability to find accurate information, rather than having all of the information they need in their head and expecting their audience to take their word for it that what they say is true.

First, the Format

When you have a good source, you want to be able to show off to your readership that you did the work involved in making sure that the information you are giving them is accurate. The best way to do this is to follow academic standards for citation. The Purdue Online Writing Lab has excellent guidelines for citing all different types of sources. Follow these guidelines and your blog will come off as classier, more authoritative and certainly more worth the time investment required to read it than are most of the blogs out there. Some Premium WordPress themes make it very easy to add citations, links and tags to blog posts, streamlining the process, which is one of the reasons that they’re so popular with bloggers.

Know When to Cite

Whenever you are saying something that isn’t general knowledge and that isn’t the result of your own research, you have to give a citation. You can look at a useful overview of copyright considerations at About.com. Before you feel like adding citations is going to make it seem like you’re just reproducing someone else’s work, you should understand what citations actually do for your blog.

One of the most significant reasons that businesses and individuals run blogs is for search engine optimization purposes. Where search engine optimization is concerned, Google likes authoritative sites. When you have links that lead to other important sites that back up what you’re saying, it makes your site more useful of a resource to readers. Adding citations doesn't make your site less desirable. It doesn't set up your site as a pointer to other sites and nothing more. It demonstrates to readers that your site is a good place to read about a given subject, as you take the time to back up what you say with citations and sources and, of course, Google will notice that.

If you are ever in doubt about whether or not you have to give a citation, consider that to mean that a citation is most certainly in order. It is always better to be safe than sorry in this regard.

Fair Use

Perhaps somewhat ironically, the concept of Fair Use is invoked unfairly all the time. Fair use is a complex legal loophole that allows people to use copyrighted material for certain purposes. They can use it for reporting the news, or doing research, for parody and for some other purposes. If you plan to use copyrighted material, the best route is to ask. Don’t rely on Fair Use to get you out of legal hot water if you violate somebody’s copyright.

Right now, ISPs and intellectual property advocates are very hot on busting people for using intellectual properties without permission. Because of that, you will always do better to ask permission and, if you cannot use the original material, you generally are free to reference it, link to it and criticize it as much as you’d like, as long as you don’t reproduce anything that the intellectual property owner prohibits you from reproducing.

Remember that a little attribution will go a long way toward making your blog a better read and less of a liability.

About Guest author

Anny Solway is a dedicated writer at ThemeFuse – a web studio that creates original WordPress themes, that can be used out of the box. She loves to share blogging and technology tips.