Marc Guberti

There is few things worse than finding your work on someone else’s website. I can say from first-hand experience that plagiarism is no good and results in a lot of angry people (who could blame them). I am a proud lensmaster on Squidoo where great content is published. Sadly, there are people who think plagiarism will lead to quick success. There was recently a website that copied EVERY lens published on Squidoo. My lenses about making money with legos, lego animations (which won the Lens of the Day award), and Lego Station lens were only 3 of the many lenses that had their content duplicated and displayed on another website. There was a lot of buzz in the SquidooHQ Forum about this issue. Squidoo was able to prevail once again and now all of the copied content has been taken down.

 

There is no victor when content is plagiarized. The real content will lose traffic because the plagiarized content steals some of the views. The person who is plagiarized loses traffic which results in lost sales and revenue. The person who does the plagiarizing will be caught and forced to close their website. Their character is completely tainted.

 

My content has made me thousands of dollars, and to see it somewhere else can result in a scare. If plagiarized content wasn’t taken down, I would have lost a lot of visitors. Being a victim of plagiarism can turn any good day into a bad day especially when thousands of words formed into hundreds of sentences are plagiarized.

 

To be a victim can change your whole perspective over the issue. Just 2 years ago, I didn’t have any content online. Now that I have tons of content online, I am grateful for my work, but disguisted when someone dares to take my work and call it their own.

One of my Squidoo lenses was recently awarded as Lens of the Day which is the hardest award to get. How does being Lens of the Day make your content viral? The answer is that Squidoo then promotes your lens on their homepage, social media (Twitter and Facebook where they have a strong following), and the SquidooHQ Blog among other places. How does this help? The answer is that my lens about How to Do A Lego Animation went from 22 views in the last 3 days to over 700 views in a SINGLE DAY which is the best number of views I have ever had from a single lens or blog in a single day. For entrepreneurs who are wondering if their new websites, blogs, or Squidoo lenses can make an impact, this lens was only on Squidoo for 4 days when it was selected as the Lens of the Day.

The statistics of my websites are very important to me because I can see my strengths and weaknesses. I also get to see how many people visit my websites. The Jetpack feature for WordPress doesn’t show many visitors for this blog at around less than 10 per day. I couldn’t believe that, so I checked my statistics on Hostgator (they host this blog), and I found statistics that showed over 50 unique visitors per day. That’s a lot different from less than 10 (and sometimes 0) visitors per day for the WordPress statistics. Sometimes, we just see the wrong statistics or see something in the wrong way but don’t know it until we see it in the right way.

Now that January is done and February has just begun, it is important to remember our New Year’s Resolutions. Most people stop working on their resolutions by Valentine’s Day, and that is something that shouldn’t happen (if the resolution is good and productive). Although I haven’t achieved my goal of making over 1k a month yet, I have achieved another goal. One of my resolutions was to do Lego animations with no software–just a camera. Doing the Lego animations took me a very long time even though the videos are short. I am putting all of my Lego animations on my Lego Station blog which can be found here. I also got the Squidoo Lens of the Day because of a Squidoo lens I did about Lego animations as well.

I’m working hard on my New Year’s Resolutions, and I hope you are too.

You must be open to other ideas and suggestions from other people. Your customer may know something that you don’t. Your customer may even be able to help your business grow. Telling someone they’re wrong and walking away turns off any desire the customer had to buy something or talk with you. Here is the better approach:

 

I am open to your suggestions to improve.

 

By improving ourselves, we become better individuals

If you are trying to get to the next level as an entrepreneur or as a business, I highly recommend doing videos. Videos are very helpful and will take you to the next level of your business or entrepreneurship. I am working on Lego animations right now which I hope will eventually make me a part of the YouTube Partnership Program.