Do Real Estate Agents need to Copyright their blog?

The short answer is yes. Why? Because a lot of lazy real estate agents are out there who want to steal your content. That original piece of content you worked so hard on. That piece of content that took you hours and hours of research. And someone just copies and pastes it on their website without any regard for your feelings. So, the answer is yes; as a real estate agent, you definitely need to copyright your blog.

There are many ways through which you can protect your real estate blog. The following steps will ensure you’re on the right path:

• First of all, educate yourself about copyright laws, copyright infringement and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
• Secondly, you need to add or update your blog footer with a Copyright Notice.
• Thirdly, you need to License your content. Creative commons is very popular especially if you do want people to copy and link back to your website
• Finally, you should add a footer to your RSS feed in your blog. This way, whenever your content is used online, a link will be sent back to you; sometimes generating more traffic for you

The steps outlined above will take you from the point of naivety towards knowledge. You must understand that if you are a real estate agent who really works hard to provide value for his audience in order to generate genuine leads, then anyone who steals your content is undoubtedly stealing your potential customers as well.

Nevertheless, with the use of technology, you can stay on top of the situation. You can check your content for duplicates online; you can also set up automatic notifications when someone uses your content online. Some even provide an automatic link back to your blog. The following tools will help you keep tabs on your content:

Google Alerts

Google Alerts are simple e-mail alerts you can easily set up by informing Google that you want to keep track on certain keywords or phrases. Whenever these keywords and phrases are used online, Google sends you an email alert notifying you.

Fairshare

Much like Google Alerts, Fairshare also sends you notifications via newsfeed and e-mail whenever your content is being plagiarized online.

Plagiarism Checkers

There are various plagiarism checking platforms in existence today. Some are very good and some are not. Some are free and some are very expensive. The best ones on the market are

• Copyscape
• Grammarly
• Plagium

Tynt

Unlike Google Alerts and Fairshare, Tynt won’t only tell you when and where your content has been used without permission; it also provides a link back to your website automatically. It does this by providing a code for you to insert into your website.

No matter how hard you try to protect your website, you will find out that someone somewhere has stolen your content. If this is the case, you can start by investigating who is hosting the website that stole your content. Who Is Hosting This can easily provide you with this information.

Once you found out who is hosting the company, let them know that they’re hosting a website with stolen content. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, they are obligated to prevent access to websites that have infringed on someone else’s copyright. You can also have the content removed from Google’s search index, but to do that you’ll have to file a DMCA request with Google.