Create Real Value By “Remixing” — How to reference blogs for producing original content

(Reading time: 6 – 9 minutes)

Heat up your content with creative remixing

Suppose you have a couple of problems on your plate. You need to figure out how to do something, and maybe you need to write a blog post or two. When possible, it makes sense to combine these activities, kill both birds with the same stone.

If you’re on the web, your first stop is a search engine. Hopefully, you’ll find the results you need really fast, and be able to take action right away…

…but probably not.

Instead, you’ll find a couple websites that are pretty close, along with half a dozen spam blogs successfully gaming your search terms, followed by people more or less copying the content from the most relevant one or two posts you found. Maybe they did some rewording. Probably not much.

So, what do you do?

Here’s what I do… Remix!

I collect up as much information as I need, then I remix it into a blog post while I’m simultaneously solving my “real” problem.

Use the source

Here’s the general procedure:

1. Solve your problem using one or more other sources. Take notes in your own words, paste in small text for quoting when appropriate.
2. Add your own original value within the mixed in content by rewriting, clarifying and extending notions from your source material. Add your own unique perspective and customization to help extend the source work even further.
3. Use concrete examples of how you took action, how you created “knowledge” from “information.”
4. Provide FULL CREDIT to all sources! LINK to the articles you found useful and cite the author by name whenever possible. Do not worry about “bleeding link juice” and do not ask for reciprocal links. You’re building on their work, they are under no obligation implicit or explicit to link forward.

Let’s take a look at some recent examples from right here on Website In A Weekend.

Do you make these mistakes blogging?

The number of “Blogging Mistakes” posts has to run into the thousands.

How could anyone write anything new on the subject?

Easy.

Say what hasn’t been said: how to fix these mistakes!

Suppose you have a bad permalink structure. You need to change it. You do change it. Your search engine results plummet. You fix that as well. Now you have a basis for a post linking “blog mistake” with “blog solution.” You don’t need to list all 17 or 29 or 313 blogging mistakes. Just list a couple and explain exactly how you fixed them.

Check this out… One mistake at the time of this writing is that there is no “Dr WordPress” portrait here on Website In A Weekend. The easy solution is point my iPhone at myself, and post the resulting photo. A better solution is to thoughtfully define exactly what I want to communicate in such a photo, then find someone really good to shoot a few pictures. Now I have real value to report:

1. Mistake: no photo
2. Specify kind of photo
3. Specify who takes the picture

The photographer, of course, would get a link, testimonial and referrals, because I won’t use pictures I am not delighted with. Regular readers, of course, will expect to see my shining face ugly mug in the masthead in the near future. (Look for the “blogging mistakes” post as well. It’s over 3000 words already, still have a ways to go.)

Everything about Sitemaps has been said

Probably, not everything has been said… but there are certainly enough posts listing the features of having a sitemap for helping search engines crawl your website. My original intention was to write an excellent article on sitemap generation while I was installing and verifying a sitemap on a new website. I got the excellent article, but it turned out to be on Google Webmaster Tools, a little different than the list of feature I had envisioned for sitemaps, but likely more useful in the long term.

Even better, I selected a couple of the features of sitemap technology, explained the benefit to the reader (that’s you), and gave a specific example of how to execute. Lists of facts about sitemaps are useful, an explanation of the benefits to you and and example of how to implement is even better. Check out the resulting article: “Using Google Webmaster Tools To Ensure Proper Search Engine Indexing.”

Customizing Thesis 404 error page

The default WordPress 404 Error page is not terribly interesting and not particularly useful for keeping readers on your website. As a a result, you should consider modifying your 404 page as one of the first things you do when setting up a new website. I just did this myself recently on several websites I operate which use the Thesis theme. I hadn’t dug into Thesis very deeply yet, so I had to do some digging around the web. Here’s what I found out.

The easiest Thesis theme 404 tutorial is by Sugar Rae, a long-time Thesis user and real smart lady. She laid it all out in a short article. I was able to implement her code example very quickly. Since her code consisted of a place holder, I decided I wanted to get even smarter, with the Smart 404 WordPress plugin from Michael Tyson. Now, my 404 page returns customized results based on the broken URL requested. At the time of this writing, that’s all I have, but I plan on implementing advertisements and current promotions into my custom 404 page in the near future.

And of course I wrote a blog post about my Thesis 404 page while I was implementing it, as you can see by the last link I gave.

Create, don’t steal

The electronic composition age of “cut-n-paste” documents follows by 50 years the revolution in sound engineering when magnetic tapes could be cut, spliced, and re-recorded. Now, as then, the objective is to build new creative work deriving from, but not blatantly copying existing works. Copyright law is clear on derivative and fair use, but it’s really no more than common sense:

1. Quote when you use small excerpts word-for-word.
2. Reference original work whenever and where ever you draw inspiration.

>>>DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer and the above is not legal advice.

Referencing other work on the web is far easier than providing formal citation for work published in more traditional venues. You have no excuse not to link to your inspiration and sources. And it gets even better: if someone you use for a source objects (for whatever reason), it’s EASY to find similar information from a different source, from someone who would be delighted for the link and attribution.

Lastly, consider using people’s actual names. Not the name of their blog, but their name. It amazes me that so few bloggers do this. I won’t drop any names here, out of context, but you will find all through my writing, off line and on, that when I cite someone, I use their name whenever I can. You should too.

Tagged as: Editorial policy, Remix, Writing