Protecting the Intellectual Property of Your Small Business

Your business blog and web site content is valuable. You’ve worked hard or paid good money to get it up online, but there are thieves waiting out there to steal your intellectual property. Whether it’s written word, audio (podcast or other,) or even images — you must protect your material from theft and hijacking.

While not every post you create on your business blog may be Copyright worthy, there are some things you must be aware of with even short reference posts. And when it comes to your longer articles — you absolutely MUST make every effort to protect those from being abused.

My partner Deborah and I write and publish at least two articles per week with our syndicated columns and magazine submissions, so keeping an eye out for intellectual property thieves is something our staff is pretty diligent about. But many small business owners are unaware of the potential exposure that comes with creating good content.

Here are just a few things that can happen when your good content gets hijacked by bad people:

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How Blogs Are Outperforming Web Sites for Small Business Owners
Part five of a five-part series

There are some important differences between a business blog and a typical, static Web site. Here are just 10 ways that blogs differ from static web sites:

· With a few simple strategies, search engine spiders will crawl and index your business blog in as little as 24 hours after a new post.

· Targeting and getting high rankings for your keyword phrases is faster and easier than with a regular web site.

· A traditional Webmaster is not required for ongoing maintenance.

· You can publish directly to the web straight from your computer.

· You can easily make changes to content with instant updates and minimal effort.

· FTP isn’t required to transfer files to your server. (more…)

Blogs and Business Blogging - The Evolution
Part four of a five-part introductory series

The term “blog” is derived from the term “Weblog” or Web log. In the early days of blogging circa mid-to-late 1990s, Web logs were used to track updates and references to other resources on the Internet.

A blog has a web-based editing tool that allows you to instantly add content live to the world wide web at any time you like, and as often as you like. To put it simply — think of blogs as a web sites that allow instant publishing.

A blog is a journal-like web site that allows you to log your thoughts, ideas, commentaries — or just about anything you can imagine. You can publish freestyle or in any manner you like on a personal blog. You simply type in your content, push a button, and you are published.

Blogs as journals have also been used as stream-of-consciousness publishing tools. They allow people to share and comment on anything of personal interest.

The act of “blogging”

Blogging is the activity of publishing content about a specific topic or theme of interest to a niche audience instantly. That content is often part commentary, part opinion, and sometimes includes links to relevant information on other blogs, websites, or offline resources. With blogging, you normally maintain a more personal tone of voice in your writing and communication.

Business blogging comes of age

But blogs have evolved into more than a tool for personal commentary and opinion. Business blogs have become powerful communication and collaboration tools. They’re being used in (more…)

Part three of a five-part series –The Dangers of Pursuing the Wrong Blog Strategy in Your Small Business

In today’s click-and-mortar marketplace, you have to think about your market’s conversations, understand its influences and needs in real time, and formulate a communication strategy in which to get connected.

If you think you will join the World Live Web (aka: the blogosphere) with a hit-and-run marketing piece — your message will be dead in the water before you will ever make a sale. You must be thoughtful and committed to building relationships. Today’s marketplace demands it!

To create a successful business blogging strategy (and over-all marketing plan) you have to (more…)

Part two of a five-part series

On the Internet, content is king! Your content must do two things in order to be considered profitable:

Your content must influence search engines and it must influence people!

Blogs excel at doing both.

Since blogs have introduced the Internet to active or live-content updates, you can use a blog to influence search engines and people much faster and more effectively than e-mail or instant messaging ever will.

E-mail is instant but closed.

Your communications, while private, do not reach search engines and only influence the limited number of people to whom it is sent.

Blogs and RSS are a new way of publishing

Blogs alert others to new information, making your content exponentially more findable, searchable, and easier to reference and promote.

This new way of communicating can be characterized as conversational in nature and real time in execution. Publishing content with a blog is more than just producing new Web content.

With business blogs, you are engaged in social marketing.

Your content can be considered as digital conversations designed to reach out to a specific social market with the expectation of eventually building relationships with your audience or readers.

You can still participate in the World Wide Web where information is static, stale, and infrequently updated. It is your choice. But you should understand the price if you should go that route.

The World Live Web is a living mechanism. It never sleeps. Everything happens in the “now.” Where it used to take Web site content weeks or months to get in the major search engines and spread; blog content takes seconds, minutes, or hours and it spreads exponentially.

A-list blogger Pakii Pierce of How to Blog for Fun and Profit states, “World Live Web content is viral and spreads easily and effectively with little effort on your part in comparison to the World Wide Web. Business content in the World Live Web outperforms the World Wide Web.”

Pakii has been blogging and building his social network at How2Blog4FunAndProfit.com where he educates his readers all about blogs and RSS. “Hands down it is the only way to publish.” Pakii tells his network.

As a business owner or entrepreneur, you now have to become a market thinker instead of a product pusher. Pushing brochure-type content or direct-marketing messages will not only fall flat, but could mean a reversal of fortune if done obnoxiously enough.

In this new era of consumer-controlled consumption, consumers are using technologies like RSS to customize their content consumption and they are using blog-commenting systems to make their presence known and felt.

John-Paul Micek is a contributing partner in the only multi-media course that truly coaches business owners how to integrate business blogging for more traffic, more clients, and more profits — Marketing With Business Blogs.

He’s a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honoulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club.


The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc. and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Over the last couple of months we’ve been getting a lot of questions regarding business blogging, RSS, and podcasting, and how they can really be leveraged to impact business growth. Between our speaking engagements, facilitating our business coaching playshops, and what seems like a lot of email — we’ve gotten dozens and dozens of people asking the same thing.

And that got Deb and I thinking. You know, it’s like anything else in life. As you become proficient at any skill, strategy, or activity, you begin to take what you know for granted. And we found that’s what happened to us over the last few months with business blogging and the business boosting benefits of podcasting and RSS. We just got so caught up in coaching our clients in these areas, applying what we know ourselves, and creating the new Marketing With Business Blogs multi-media coaching course that we forgot that many business owners are just becoming aware of blogging as a technology.

But blogging is so much more than a new technology. Sure if you look at some of the books, products, or programs on blogging out there, that’s what you’d think the hype was all about. And to be honest with you, if you let yourself get caught up in focusing on blogging alone — getting all set up with your first business blog and starting out with the inadequate general guidance that most people are offering on business blogging, it will end up giving you disappointing “hype-like” results. But more on that later.

The point is, you have to start your journey of learning with a clear picture of what you can expect. That’s why Deborah and I put this five part series together.

What’s the big deal with business blogs, RSS, and podcasting

Small-business owners are clamoring to get their hands on resources that show them how to learn and leverage the technology of blogs and RSS (Real Simple Syndication).

Why are blogs so popular with small-business owners? It has to do with how the Internet is changing the way business gets done. And it’s because of the “World LIVE Web.”

According to Technorati.com:

“The World LIVE Web is the syndicated subset of the World Wide Web. Sites in this subset update often, sending out ‘live’ notifications by RSS and similar means every time new content is posted or updated.

Technorati indexes more than three-million sources on the World Live Web. Each one of these sources can be updated at any time, generating ‘active content’ (such as new blog entries) within a 24-hour period.”

It’s the social networking that makes the difference

In essence, the World Live Web is that part of the Web that is LIVE and operates in real-time. Blogs allow for the real-time publishing of information and the ability to reference and link to that information instantly. Blogs magnificently and ingeniously send notification about new information to the World Live Web as it becomes available.
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Deborah and I have been traveling back and forth from Hawaii to the mainland for several speaking engagements and business coaching “playshops” over the last five weeks (with one more two week trip starting this week.) Things have been hectic with the launch of the new “Marketing With Business Blogs” multi-media coaching course, and a new breakthrough business coaching program we’ll be revealing this weekend when we present at Stephen Pierce’s Unleash Your Marketing Genius event in Ann Arbor Mi.

But I just had to take a couple of minutes to let you know about this little firestorm about started at a recent internet marketing conference. It has to do with royalties “supposedly” due to a company that “supposedly” invented the MP3 technology.

Yep, that’s right — royalties on your MP3 Podcasts! (Or any MP3 products for that matter.)

I heard about this a few months ago but after doing some investigation and speaking with our attorney thought it was so ridiculous, I forgot about it. But now, some opportune marketers have decided to use this trouble making company from France (no surprise there) as a scare tactic for promoting their products and services. One of my friends let me know about what was said at the Las Vegas marketing conference right after the event, and I think it’s outrageous that marketers would attempt to sell based primarily on fear and mis-information.

Jim Edwards wrote a great piece addressing this issue in detail over at his “igottatellyou” blog and I suggest you give it a read. There are several good resources mentioned in the comments section as well if you’re interested in doing more research on your own.

Deb and I just got done with a business blogging article series that we’ll be starting to post on Wednesday. We should be back on track with our regular posting schedule now, even with this upcoming two week trip. They’ll be some exciting changes coming to the blog when we get back in August.

Happy business blogging!

John-Paul Micek is a contributing partner in the only multi-media course that truly coaches business owners how to integrate business blogging for more traffic, more clients, and more profits — Marketing With Business Blogs.

He’s a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honoulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club.


The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc. and licensed under a Creative Commons License.