Since I first wrote about people stealing my content last November, “How to blog, write, and speak with integrity” I’ve gotten lots of contacts asking me how to properly repost or cite blog posts, web articles, and news stories.

Here are some tips for reposting internet content with style and grace.

• Never repost an entire article without permission from the site owner. First, its a breach of etiquette. Second, nabbing someone’s content without their consent is theft of their intellectual property. Third, even if you link back, most agree that search engines will punish both domains for duplicate content. How do you get permission? You ask! Email the author or use their contact form or just leave a comment on the post. Most will, happily and free of charge offer you their content.
• Use an excerpt of no more than two paragraphs. Chose the part of the article that reasonated with you the most or makes the point most clearly, and excerpt it. You can wrap the excerpt in the context of a point you are writing about or simply post the excerpt with a question or thought for discussion. Bloggers consider this a high compliment. And news agencies (and other sources very sensitive about their intellectual property) won’t be concerned that you are trying to gain traffic off of their content.
• Set your excerpt apart graphically. For any quote of more than two sentences use the block quote feature of any blog editor. To make it even more clear that I’m quoting something, I like to italicize the whole piece.
• Link directly to the source content. Typically, I link to the source two times just to be absolutely certain my readers know the excerpt is not mine and where to find the source. I set the the quote up (or follow-up) with linking the article to the authors name. “I was reading Adam McLane’s dare for pastors the other day…” Then, after I’ve posted the excerpt, I link to the source with the words “Source” or “Read the rest.“
• Hat tips and Trackbacks are still good manners. A hat tip is simply a gesture that another person provided the idea for your post or otherwise recognizing another person for contributing to your post. (ht to Adam McLane) A trackback alerts the blog owner that you’ve linked to them. On some sites, the trackback appears as a comment on the original post while on other sites it never appears publicly but is tracked by the owners site software. In WordPress, I manually enter a trackback for every link I put in a post to a news site or blog.

I hope these tips are useful. Each of these things only takes a few moments but makes a big difference in creating professional quality content. More importantly, to your readers it communicates that you aren’t a slob with other people’s intellectual property.

Have more questions about this topic? Leave a comment!