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October 4, 2018Plagiarism is quite a popular subject among online marketers and rightly so. If there is something completely prohibited for online marketers, it is plagiarism. While you will still find people in the field who will try to justify this act or tell you various ways of plagiarism without getting caught, these things still don’t make plagiarism a legal and acceptable action. There are several reasons why online marketers should avoid plagiarism and some are so crucial that if ignored can lead to lawsuits and other legal actions. Some of the most important reasons are given below. In the end, it is all dependent on you and your inner conscience as in all other matters of life.
Before a man thinks about his profession or career, he naturally gets a sense of right and wrong. Is it right to take someone’s content, put it on your website and then call it your own or wrong? No one can answer this better than your conscience and that’s when you gauge your actions as ethical or unethical. In a nutshell, it makes you a very pitiless marketing person when you start copying content from another source without citing its original owner. Is being answerable to yourself a big thing for you? The decision is yours to make.
You have to avoid plagiarism in copying written content, articles, reviews, images, videos and any other form of information for legal reasons as well. You could face lawsuits for copying someone’s content, especially when it is copyrighted content. Furthermore, it is not necessary for the owner of the original content to catch you: anyone who recognizes that the content you are using is from someone else could pull you into court. In simple words, you might have to pay heavy fines and in some cases, spend some time behind the bars for breaking the copyright rules.
If you earn your livelihood from writing then you definitely don’t want to go even close to plagiarism. You could have a big blow on your professional career if your content is caught as plagiarized content. For example, if you are writing as an online freelance writer for various employers and they catch your content as copied content with the help of software, you might lose the money you were supposed to get against your work. Your employer could warn other employers about this act as well and this could end your professional career.
More than your professional career, the websites and companies you write for are faced by dangers when you provide them with copied content. If the content that you copied from another source without mentioning the owner’s name is put on the website by your employer, he could have his website thrown out of the rankings. Getting thrown out of search engine results means a loss of millions of dollars on a monthly basis for bigger companies. At the same time, it destroys the reputation of that company among its competitors and consumers as well.