(Skirt, Primark; sweater, thrifted; shoes, Kurt Geiger c/o Idealo.co.uk)
Yesterday I got my hair cut and…
HOLD IT! STOP RIGHT THERE, you, with your finger poised upon the red cross at the top right of your browser. Yes, I see you doing that, but don’t worry, this isn’t one of THOSE posts. You know, those posts where I have a really bad haircut, and then I whine about it, and you all tut-tut and shake your heads and say We told you so, Amber, why you never listen? (In pidgin English apparently. Huh.) and I’m all I know, I know, but this time I have truly learned my lesson!, but you all know I haven’t, and you’re right, because I never do.
No, it’s not one of THOSE posts. This time. Actually, the haircut was fine. But That Thing happened again. It always does. It happens anywhere I’m forced to make small-talk with people I don’t know, actually, but as I don’t get out much, that means it happens most often at the salon. It goes like this:
STYLIST: So! Off work today are we?
[Thinks: getting her hair done in the middle of the day, wearing an outfit which would in no way be appropriate for a nice, respectable office job: bitch is either out of work, or on a day off. Hope it's the latter, or I'm not getting a tip!]
ME: [Thinks: Oh God, here we go... It's That Thing again, dammit!]
Um, no, actually, I work from home! Am self-employed! Can leave house any time I like, go me!
[Thinks: Why also speaking pidgin English, why?]
STYLIST: Oh, really? What is it that you do?
ME: [I wish I was dead now.] I’m a, er, well, it’s like, I’m one of those…
STYLIST: [Oh God, is hooker!]
ME: I’m a BLOGGER.
STYLIST: ???????
ME: I BLOG.For a living. Also, I wish I was dead. Not for a living, though. Well, kind of.
STYLIST: A booger? That’s a job?
ME: BLAWG. ER. I have blawgs. I mean, blogs. On the Internets.
STYLIST: [The hell?]
[Lengthy pause.]
So! Off anywhere nice on holiday this year?
This happens every single time I meet someone new. Or rather, it DID. You see, after the first few times, I got wise to it. I came to realise that while I live, eat, and breathe blogging, to most of the rest of the world it’s still quite a new, and really totally weird, thing. I realised this after the one-millionth conversation with my mum in which she said, “I met So-and-So today. She asked what you were up to these days, so I told her you were a blogger, and then I had to spend twenty minutes explaining what that was. She still didn’t understand, though. Next time, I think I’ll just say you’re dead.”*
(That last bit was a joke, by the way. Parents very supportive of blogging career. Also totally reading this. In fact, right now, my mum’s turning from her screen to shout, “John! She’s making us look bad on the Internet again! Do you want to phone her this time?”)
(That was also a joke. Mostly.)
Once I realised that people in the Real World aren’t really ready for the concept of blogging for a living, I decided there was no point in mentioning it. So now I just say something like, “I have an online publishing company,” (which is technically true, but always makes me sound like a bit of an asshole) or, more often, “I run a bunch of websites”. Both of these answers have exactly the same conversation-stopping abilities as “I’m a blogger,” though. Not once has anyone ever followed up with “What do you write about?” or anything like that (Well, other than my dentist, but I had my mouth full at the time, so I couldn’t really answer him properly. He still thinks I’m a “dogger”, which is, like, a TOTALLY different thing…): instead, their eyes just take on a glazed look, and I can almost see the cogs in their brains turning as they try to come up with a conversational out. “Trust me to get stuck talking to the weirdo in the room!” I sense them thinking. And then I do that thing where I start talking too fast about absolutely nothing at all, in a bid to cover my embarrassment, and… actually, I wonder if this is why no one ever invites me to their parties any more?
I don’t really know why it should be this way. The Internet, after all, is not a new invention. Neither is publishing. But publishing ON THE INTERNET? WHOA, there, sister! Enough of that crazy talk! Ironically, my websites get more visitors per month than many magazines do, but if I were to tell my stylist I ran a magazine, say, she’d probably find that vaguely interesting – or at least know what I was talking about. Saying you’re a blogger, however, still has a bit of a stigma to it, even it’s only the stigma attached to something that is not yet mainstream enough for people to really “get” it.
Honestly, I blame Jude Law. For a lot of things, actually, but seriously, have you seen Contagion?
Anyway, my search for a way to explain what I do for a living without making people recoil in horror continues. Of course, I could just go back to saying “I’m a writer”, but, having done that in the past, I find it makes me sound a lot more interesting than I actually am, and I like to keep people’s expectations of me good and low, so I don’t disappoint them any more than I can help. On second thoughts, maybe I should just stick with “blogger”…
One of the side-effects of blogging for a living is that, after a while, people start to assume that you know what you’re talking about, and they send you emails and tweets asking for advice on how they can blog for a living, too.
I get quite a lot of these requests, and honestly, I never really know how to answer them: not just because I always feel like I’m making it up as I go along, and that one day someone will go, “Wait! This woman isn’t a REAL pro-blogger! This woman is an IMPOSTOR!” and my professional-blogger card will be revoked or something, but also because it’s such a huge subject that there’s no easy answer. I mean, entire books have been written on the subject of blogging: how can I expect to dispense nuggets of wisdom in the space of a 140-character tweet, or in a few paragraphs of an email? Just in case you haven’t noticed, I’m wordy. I sometimes have to use several tweets, just to talk about my breakfast*, so I’ve NO hope of being able to give you blogging tips over Twitter.
(*Not true. I never tweet about my breakfast.)
Rather than writing lengthy emails or multiple tweets, then, I thought I’d put together a lengthy blog post instead, which I can point people to in the event of their asking my advice. And here it is!
Important note for new readers: most of these questions are geared towards blogging for money, and as you can see, I don’t do that here, so if you’re curious to see examples of what I’m talking about, you might want to check out my commercial sites, The Fashion Police, Shoeperwoman and Hey, Dollface! I should probably stress, before I get started, that I don’t have all of the answers. I attribute a lot of the success of my blogs to dumb luck, and being in the right place at the right time, so I’m not writing this as an “expert”, but simply as an easy way to answer some of the questions I’m asked most frequently. Starting off with…
How on earth can you make money from blogging?
This is by far the most frequent question I get asked. (Well, actually, no it isn’t: “Do redheads have souls?” is the most frequent question I get asked. But the less said about that, the better…). Most people understand WHAT I do – I post photos of shoes, dresses, and sometimes myself on the Internet every day. They just don’t understand how I can possibly be getting paid for it. Which is fair enough, really: I mean, it’s a kinda weird thing to be getting paid for, isn’t it? If I were to go back in time and tell my younger self, “Amber, one day there will be a thing called the Internet, and you will get paid to put pictures of shoes on it,” my younger self would be AMAZED. Not least because she totally expected she would grow up to be a famous showjumper, and be in the Olympics and stuff. It’s funny how things work out, isn’t it?
On the other hand, though, it’s actually not THAT strange, when you really think about it. I mean, a blog is just another form of media, like a newspaper, or magazine, or TV show. And if you can create something – ANYTHING, really – that enough people want to look at every day, then there’s going to be some way to make money out of it. If enough people look at your blog, then there are actually lots of different ways you can monetise it. I do it by charging for advertising space on the sites: basically, the more popular a site is, the more people are willing to pay to have their advert displayed on it, and there are lots of different types of adverts you can use, which I’ll talk about some other time. Or, you know, maybe I won’t.
Some bloggers also use the popularity of their blogs to help establish themselves as experts in their fields, and that allows them to charge for other services: public speaking, consultancy, freelancing, etc. I don’t do any of that, so if you’re looking for tips on those things, sorry, nothing to see here..
What should I write about?
The answer to this is limited only by your imagination, so my best advice is to write about something you are genuinely passionate about, and which there’s a good chance you’ll be able to CONTINUE to write about, over and over again, for a very long time. You could, of course, pick some random subject which you think will be profitable, but trust me: it’s hard enough to find something to say about the things you ARE interested in after a while, without trying to write about something you don’t really care about. I mean, there are days when even I think, “Jesus, they’re JUST SHOES.” Seriously.
So, first of all, pick a subject you have some knowledge of, and which you know you’ll be able to generate lots of content about, for the foreseeable future. Pick a subject you have something to say about – and, ideally, which you have something UNIQUE to say about. If there are a hundred blogs about cheese, say, you better have something different to say about cheese, or people will have no reason to read your blog rather than all of the other cheese-lovin’ blogs. God, I love cheese.
Finally, pick something that other people are interested in, too. You could be the world’s leading expert on the mating habits of the electric catfish, for instance, but if you also happen to be the only person in the world interested in the mating habits of the electric catfish, your blog probably won’t be attracting readers in their thousands. Just you and the electric catfish, really.
(No offence to electric catfish.)
Do I really need to have a “niche”? Can’t I just write about ME, wonderful ME?
Well, you can, obviously. You can write about anything you like. But you’ll find it much more difficult to make money out of blogging if you don’t have a focus. Take this site, for instance. It’s the blog I’ve had longest, and it’s the one I have the biggest emotional connection to, but it’s by far the least successful of all of my sites. Even Hey, Dollface! which is updated infrequently, and always the first site to be neglected if I’m busy, gets more than twice the traffic this site does. There could be – and probably are – lots of reasons for that, obviously, but the most obvious one is that this site doesn’t have any particular focus, and the others all do. People like to know what they’re getting. They tend to like blogs which are about SOMETHING, as opposed to blogs which are about EVERYTHING. There are some very notable exceptions to that, obviously – I’m thinking of people like Dooce, here – but they’re few and far between, and tend to have a) gotten into blogging just at the right time or b) had something really dramatic happen to them (in Dooce’s case, getting fired because of her blog) which catapulted them into the public eye. So while I’m not saying it’s impossible to have a commercially successful blog with no particular focus, I am saying you’ll be making it much harder on yourself.
Which blogging platform should I use?
Obviously personal preference will come into play here, but I’ve used Blogger, Typepad, Moveable Type and WordPress, and for what it’s worth, WordPress kicks them all to the kerb. In my humble opinion, anyway. As well as being self-hosted (you’ll want to be self-hosted if you plan on making a business out of blogging), it’s totally customisable, very user-friendly, and is constantly being updated, and having new plugins, etc developed for it. Whichever platform you decide to go with, though, the most important thing is to think very carefully about it BEFORE you start your blog. Don’t just get impatient and sign up for Blogger because it’s free, and all the other kids are using it, because Blogger sucks ass if you change your mind down the line (and trust me, you will) you’ll find that moving platforms can be an absolute bitch – especially if you have a blog with a large amount of posts. Trust one who has been there and done it, although thankfully not with Blogger, which I’ve only ever used for brief periods of time.
* * *
So, when I started writing this, I thought I could answer all of the questions in one, and have a neat little post I could point people to when they ask me for blogging advice. I must have been delirious or something, though, because, like I say, I’M WORDY. And it turns out that I have a LOT to say about not having a lot to say on this subject, and as I’ve just hit the 1,500 word mark (First rule of blogging: KEEP IT SHORT. No one reads long posts!) on this, I’ve decided to split this up into a few different posts. So, yay, that’s something for you all to look forward to, no? And you thought this week would be boring, too!
I’m joking. I won’t do them all in one week. I may not do them all AT ALL, actually. We’ll see…
This is how my week is shaping up so far.
Yeah, I got Man Flu, a.k.a. “a really heavy cold, but I will dramatise it to the extent that it will totally seem like I’ve had flu”. And I will liveblog it, too. Because I do that.
(Um, I don’t have a chesty cough, by the way. This was just the only cold remedy I had in the house. This is the most fascinating post I’ve written in a while, huh?)
As always when I get ill, I I find myself face-to-face with one of the very few downsides of self-employment. You see, my bed is RIGHT THERE. I can actually see it from my desk. I bet it would be really comfy and cosy in there right now. I could curl up with a good book, and maybe some really unhealthy snack food (because, as we all know, food you eat while ill totally doesn’t count. Feed a cold, folks!) and a giant mug of coffee. It would be almost like a holiday, but with added Lemsip and sneezing. It would be ace, actually.
But it is not to be. Because if I were to give in to this impulse, and retire to bed to nurse my Man Flu, my laptop would taunt me from just across the hall. “Hey, Amber!” it would say. “While you’re languishing in bed, like a Jane Austen heroine with a touch of the vapours, no one is doing your work! Your readers are all unsubscribing in droves. They will NEVER come back, and you will go out of business, and have to go and work down the pit or something. Have a nice day!” And even although my laptop is actually talking rubbish here, I believe it, and so I bravely soldier on, even although I think my nose just fell off and rolled under my desk.
Instead of taking the day off and going back to bed, then, I’m just going to whine a lot instead. I apologise in advance to those of you who follow me on Twitter…
Tagged lurgy
 Well, after what feels like an entire year’s worth of bad news for my blogging endeavours (See: having to take legal action against a copycat site, being relentlessly plagiarised by dozens of other websites, Google’s Panda update killing our traffic… I could go on), last night I finally got the boost I was so badly needing, with the news that my fashion blog, TheFashionPolice.net has been nominated for a Cosmo Blog Award in the Established Fashion Blog category.
I can’t tell you how excited I was to hear this. It was completely unexpected for me: I knew the Cosmo awards were taking place, of course, but having failed to even be nominated last year, I didn’t bother asking people to vote for TFP this year. I put out a couple of Tweets about Shoeperwoman, but I knew the competition would be fierce, so after that I pretty much forgot about it, and when people on Twitter started getting excited about the nominations announcement yesterday, I didn’t join in, because I knew – I just KNEW – that I wasn’t in with a chance. That’s the way this year has gone.
When I finally did click through to see the nominations, it confirmed exactly what I’d thought: I had no chance. The Established Fashion Blog category is full of some of the best bloggers in the UK: big names, who I fully expected to see there. And then, towards the bottom of the list… me. Wow. I am completely blown away. I know people always bang on about how “it’s an honour just to be nominated”, and I never really believe them, because I always just think, “yeah, yeah, you want to win”. To have been nominated alongside such fantastic bloggers, though, is absolutely amazing to me, and has really helped lift my spirits, at a time when I badly needed it, so if you were one of the people who nominated me than THANK YOU.
With all of that said, though… I would really like to win! So if you have a few spare seconds to vote for The Fashion Police, I would really, really appreciate it: all you have to do is click here to go to the Cosmo site (you’ll have to enter your email address to vote: sorry! Please don’t hate me!), go to the “Established Fashion Blog” site and vote for The Fashion Police. Then wait for good karma to come your way, which it surely will…
Terry has prepared this handy graphic to help you. Now that’s worth a vote on its own, surely?
(Note: If you’re a new reader, you may want to read this post first, for some context…)
Just last week, I was sitting at my computer, quietly working away, when I thought to myself, “You know, it’s been a long time since someone tried to rip me off on the Internet: maybe the copycats have finally found someone else to bother?”
Famous last words. Within twenty four hours of me publishing “Teddies on the Freeway” – I got a trackback from this site:
At first glance, I wasn’t too perturbed. It looked like one of the many, many content-scraping sites which use your RSS feed to republish the first few lines of your post, normally with a “read more” link that links back to the original site. There are hundreds of those sites out there, and they’re not TOO much of an issue for us (Although, thanks to Google’s recent Panda update, some of them are becoming more of a problem), so I was prepared to let it go.
Then I scrolled down the page:
Ah. That would be my photo. And more of my text. And, in fact, the entire post: all 1,500 words of it.
It’s also my bear, of course, which means that not only do these people steal photos of ME, now they’re stealing photos of TED, too! And let me tell you, Ted is NOT a bear who takes that kind of thing lightly. And nor am I, for that matter. In fact, I was pretty damn furious, to be honest, because not only had this site blatantly ripped off my content and photos, they were also using it commercially: the entire post was surrounded by Google Adsense adverts, allowing the copycats to profit from a post I’M not even making money from myself. So, basically, I’d spent part of my Saturday morning working for someone else, without even knowing I was doing it, and without earning a single penny for it. And you know, I’m not for a second suggesting that it was the greatest post ever written, but if it’s going to be making money for someone, I think that someone should be ME, the actual author, as opposed to the owner of some random website, who thinks he/she has the right to use other people’s work for free.
What amazes me most about all of this isn’t the fact that this site stole my post: sadly, that’s become all too common these days. No, what amazes me most is how BLATANT they were about it. I discovered the theft because I got a trackback from the copycat’s site, and the reason I got that trackback was because they’d actually linked back to me. Twice.
I’m assuming that by linking back in this way, the content thief assumed it was OK to reproduce a 1,500 word post in its entirety. I’m assuming this because I’ve seen it happen so many times now: I’ve even had people who’ve stolen content from me react with total astonishment when I’ve asked them to remove it, and say, “But I linked back to you!” Yes, you did. Thank you. But that doesn’t change the fact that you took something that belongs to me and used it without my permission. And that’s wrong. I don’t spend hours writing posts and taking photos just so YOU can get a bit of extra traffic to your site. I do not pay an image agency for photographs so that YOU can use them for free. I am not working for you. And of course, we’d ALL like to be able to have content for our sites every day that we didn’t have to create ourselves, or pay someone else for. The fact is, though, that SOMEONE is paying for that content. SOMEONE is having to go to the time and effort of creating it. And that person should be the one who gets to decide how and where it gets used.
But back to the teddy bears.
Unusually for a content scraping site, comments were open on the post, so, as there was no other way to contact the site owner, I left a comment pointing out that I was the author of the post and that it was being used without permission. My comment never did make it out of moderation, but it must have gotten through to someone, because by the time we came home on Saturday night, the whole site was down: it came back up on Sunday, but minus my post. I didn’t get any kind of explanation or apology from the site owner, but then again, I didn’t expect to.
Having successfully rid the internet of one more copycat, however, my work was not done, because when we got home from our day out on Sunday, I found an email from someone drawing my attention to this eBay auction:
Regular readers may recognise the photo of yours truly from this post. Even if you didn’t recognise it, you’d have known it was me, on account of the “ForeverAmber.co.uk” watermark which the seller hadn’t bothered to remove from the photo. In the gallery underneath it, there were two more photos of me, both also watermarked. Of course, I’m pretty used to finding photos of my feet, lips and eyes being used to sell things on eBay, but this was the the first time someone had used a photo of my ENTIRE BODY, so it was a landmark moment. (The person who found it was a photographer, who’d noticed the watermarks on the images, realised the images were stolen, and very kindly let me know about it, commenting that he hates it when people use his photos without permission, and he figured I might feel the same. How right he was!)
I emailed the seller through the “Ask Seller a Question” link, and, once again pointed out that hey, those are my images, and I didn’t take them in order to help you sell boots on eBay! (Also: it’s misleading to use a photo like this, because it means that the item pictured isn’t the item being sold. I know when I buy things on eBay, I like to see a photo of the thing I’m actually bidding on, not a photo of some random blogger prancing around a beach.) She said she “didn’t realise” the photos belonged to someone (Was the fact that they’re photos OF SOMEONE not enough of a clue, then? Did the watermarks not give her even a tiny bit of a hint?) and that she would remove them because “they were never going to affect wether [sic] I sell the goods or not.”
Just another weekend in the life of the most copied woman on the Internet…
This arrived in the mail today.
Bring it on, all you McNaughties out there…
(P.S. This makes me officially a superhero now. Anyone know where to get good capes these days?)
Tagged shoeperwoman
(This photo has absolutely nothing to do with the post.)
Over the past few months, I’ve been noticing an increasing level of controversy in the blogosphere (oh, how I hate that word) surrounding the issue of blogging for money. Bangs and a Bun and A Thrifty Mrs have both addressed the topic this week, and I’ve found myself wholeheartedly agreeing with what they’ve had to say, and specifically, with this:
Amen to that, sister.
And yet, this attitude that Muireann talks about is one that comes up again and again. I’ve read SO many negative comments about pro-bloggers now, ranging from the sneeringly contemptuous “People actually think they can make a living out of blogging? How sad!” to the oft-repeated view that blogging should only ever be a hobby, and that those who turn it into a career are somehow “selling out” or letting the side down. “I blog for MYSELF!” these people cry, proudly. “I would NEVER try to make money from my blog!”
Well, I blog for myself too: this site, for instance, doesn’t carry any advertising, and therefore doesn’t make me a penny. But I also blog for money: Shoeperwoman, The Fashion Police and Hey, Dollface! are all commercial blogs, which were set up as business concerns, with the sole aim of making money. And they do make money. Not a huge amount of it, granted – I’m not going to be selling up and moving to the Caribbean any time soon – but enough for me to have been able to make blogging my career, and the sole source of my income. This makes me something of a pariah in certain sectors of the blogging community, but I have absolutely no shame about the way I choose to earn my living, and here’s why:
When I first started blogging, back in 2006, I had absolutely no idea that it was something I could hope to make a living out of. I was a freelance journalist at the time, and Forever Amber was just a natural extension of the Livejournal I’d kept for years at that point – and, I guess, of the dozens of paper journals I’d faithfully recorded my life in from the age of 11 onwards. (I still have them. I can’t read them without wanting to go back in time and slap my younger self.)
(This photo has nothing to do with the post either.)
It didn’t occur to me that I could make money out of blogging until I started freelancing for Shiny Media in 2007. And when the penny finally dropped that hey, some people were actually making money out of writing about shoes and dresses, and that it may as well be me, it didn’t occur to me that there was anything controversial about that. It still doesn’t, if I’m honest. All I thought was that if there was an opportunity for me to make a living out of doing something I loved, I was sure as hell going to take it.
I would challenge anyone presented with that opportunity to turn their back on it. Isn’t that the dream, after all? That you find a way to turn a hobby into a career, and no longer have to dread Monday mornings, or stand in the shower wishing you could vanish down the plughole instead of going into work? It was for me. It was MY dream. (Turning a hobby into a career, I mean, not blogging specifically. When I was a kid, I didn’t go around saying, “When I grow up I want there to be a thing called The Internet and I want to write words about shoes on it. We will call it “blogging”.) I just hadn’t found a way to make it happen yet, and when I finally did, I jumped on it. And I would do it again.
When I set up my commerical blogs, I made no bones about the fact that I was hoping to make some money from them. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy writing for them, or that I’m not passionate about the subject matters those sites cover, because I do, and I am. The reason I chose to create blogs about fashion, shoes and makeup was because I’m interested – sometimes to the point of obsession – in those subjects, and I believed I’d do a better job writing about something I genuinely loved. As corny as it might sound, Terry’s illness had been a bit of a “come to Jesus” moment for me. It had made me realise that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life commuting to a temperature-controlled office every day to do something I didn’t enjoy. We all have to earn a living somehow, but I wanted to earn mine doing something that didn’t feel like a chore to me: blogging was that thing, and it came along at exactly the right time. I will be forever grateful for that.
(Neither does this one. Although I did receive those shoes from a PR company. Sellout!)
Again, I didn’t think for a second that I was “selling out” by creating those sites, or that there was anything even remotely controversial about them. In fact, I viewed them in the same way someone else might view a startup magazine or newspaper. No one tells a newspaper journalist or a feature writer on a fashion magazine that they should write purely “for themselves”, and that taking a salary every month makes them a dirty rotten sellout. In fact, I don’t think there are ANY professions where it’s considered the norm for people to work for nothing, and if there are, I don’t want any part of them. I have to pay the bills somehow, after all. And, you know, buy the shoes.
Of course, one of the main objections to blogging for bucks is the idea that if you’re making money from your blog, you can’t possibly be trusted. So, basically, no one who has adverts on their blog is ever telling the truth. No one who receives a product sample to review is ever able to review it honestly: they just say nice things in order to keep the freebies coming. And, you know, I’m sure there are bloggers like that (Although quite why you’d write a glowing review of a product you hated just so you could get even MORE of the products you hate is beyond me.) We’re not ALL like that, though. It is possibly to blog with integrity AND get paid for it. It’s possible to tell a PR person that sure, they can send over that product (IF it’s something that’s going to be of interest to the readers of the blog), but that you may not choose to review it, and if you do, you’ll do so honestly. If they’re a professional firm, that’s exactly what they’ll expect, anyway.
For me, one of the best things about blogging is that it can be anything you want it to be. If you want it to be a purely creative outlet, then it can. If you want it to be a way to record your life, and to share it with your family and friends, then it can be that, too. And if you want to try and turn it into a career, there’s really nothing stopping you. So if you want to blog purely for yourself, and you have no interest in making money from it then that’s absolutely fine and no one will think any the less of you. As for me, though, I’m going to continue doing my best to make a living out of something I love.
Edited to add: Thanks for all your comments on this, everyone! I just wanted to make it clear that this post wasn’t about criticism I’ve received personally - it was just in response to the various comments I read about pro-blogging in general, which obviously strike a chord with me because it’s what I do!
Yes, it’s another post about people who copy my websites. Sorry, I’d be bored hearing about this by now too, but it really has become the over-riding theme of our lives at the moment, and it makes me so angry I just have to keep on venting. Feel free to scroll on by…
So, remember in my last post, when I said I was particularly angry because although we’d successfully managed to get one host to remove Lin Shuideng’s copy-cat websites, there were no other consequences for this person, who would be free to just start up again with another host?
That’s exactly what happened.
Last night, the website I wrote about last week was reactivated, this time with 600 of my posts copied in their entirety.
And so we begin again. Another Friday, another day spent filing DCMA notices and trying to persuade yet another host to stop the same person, doing the same damn thing. And I know we’ll be successful. The host will remove the site. And then next week? Next week we’ll get to start all over again, with yet another host. As this point I feel like we’re going to spend the rest of our days chasing Lin Shuideng around the internet, and I honestly can’t tell you how dispiriting that is.
On the plus side, I guess we’ll end up with a very streamlined process of filing paperwork and having these sites removed. It still just seems wrong to me, though, that I’ll have to file the same notice, against the same person, over and over and over again, when really, someone like Lin Shuideng should be prevented from registering another domain or buying new hosting space ever again. I know that’s not practical. I don’t have any solution to it. I just know that thanks to Google’s awesome work with their algorithm, before they were removed last week, the copycat sites were ranking higher than Shoeperwoman.com for the articles they’d stolen, which means that I was losing traffic to someone who had just blatantly stolen from me. And the more duplicates there are of my work online (bear in mind that Lin had set up two websites, both containing hundreds of my posts, within the space of a couple of days), the harder it will be for my sites to survive. This is why I can’t just shrug my shoulders and ignore this. It won’t just go away: in fact, it will just get worse.
I also know that “Lin Shuideng” (I still don’t know if that’s a real name, by the way. I assume it isn’t, so I’m just using it as shorthand for “The Mysterious Stranger Who is Hellbent on Destroying My Sanity”) isn’t just stealing work from me. Last week, Terry did a bit of digging, and discovered some other shoe blogs which had been targetted by this person, and which now have illegal duplicates of large numbers of their posts online. Of course, we contacted the bloggers in question to let them know about it, but we notice that the copy sites are still going strong, so obviously they haven’t yet been successful in having them removed either.
Oh, and Terry’s detective work yesterday also turned up ANOTHER site, which has also copied lots of my posts, and this one actually has the cheek to have added the line “What do U think, xoxo Shoeperwoman” to each one. I mean, AS IF I would abuse the letter “U” in that way! And honestly: why would you steal someone’s work and then go out of your way to add the name of the site you’d stolen it from to every single one of the posts? WHY?
We’ve contacted the respective hosts of both of the new copycat sites.
We’re yet to receive a response from either of them.
And so it begins again.
I hope Lin Shuideng and everyone else like him/her is haunted by THAT OLD WOMAN from Insidious until the end of their days. Now THAT would be justice.
UPDATE: The new host removed Lin Shiudeng’s site on Friday night, in response to our DMCA notice. It was back up on Saturday morning, this time containing content stolen from various wedding websites (some of which, admittedly, appear to be free article sites, which would be legal to reproduce). Lin doesn’t really take a hint.
ANOTHER UPDATE: (Saturday, 2pm) I spoke too soon: just got a Google alert letting me know that Lin has set up a new website, with all of its content stolen from me again. Lots of personal photos on it, plus lots of reader-submitted photos from the Shoeper Shoe Challenge, which is really distressing me, because obviously those people didn’t submit those photos to me so they could appear all over the web. So we don’t even get our one-week break this time, we just go straight from fighting to get the last site taken down to fighting to get this new one taken down. Furious. On the plus side, it doesn’t cost us anything but our time to have these sites removed, but it WILL be costing Lin money to have to buy an entire new server every day…
YET ANOTHER UPDATE (Monday 23rd, 10am): We managed to get the latest Lin site taken down within a few hours. Damn, but we’re getting good at this! Terry’s spent most of the weekend tracking down more sites that are scraping our content… may as well get them all while we’re in “DCMA Mode”!
AND ANOTHER ONE! (Monday 23rd, 1:30pm) It turns out that while we were busy getting Lin’s last site taken down on Saturday (because that’s obviously our favourite way to spend the weekend…) Lin was just as busy setting up another one. With hundreds of posts stolen from me. Since last week, getting rid of this one person’s sites has become a full-time job for Terry. Obviously that’s not sustainable for us: no sooner do we get one site removed than another one pops up, and Terry is now spending ALL of his time having this one person’s illegal copies of our sites removed. How is that in any way fair?
I wrote a massive, 2000 word rant about this yesterday morning, just to get it all out of my head, but what it basically boils down to is this:
The hosts of the site which had stolen 500 of my posts removed it on Friday night.
Not without a fight, and not before they’d recommended we hire a lawyer (AGAIN) to have it removed, but they finally, albeit reluctantly, agreed to take it down.
Oh, and they ALSO took down the OTHER site we found on Friday, which:
- was ALSO registered to Lin Shuideng.
- was ALSO hosted by the same US company which was hosting the first site.
- ALSO contained around 500 of my posts, copied and pasted in their entirety, complete with images and watermarks. In fact, it was the SAME 500 posts the first site had stolen.
I don’t get much luck with this kind of thing, do I?
Oh, and Lin Shuideng? Had around 300 domains. As far as we can tell, they were ALL hosting stolen material. This person wasn’t just ripping off me, he/she was ripping off HUNDREDS of people. So if the hosts had stuck to their guns, they would have required a possible 300 people to hire 300 lawyers, to file 300 pieces of paperwork, to stop ONE PERSON BLATANTLY breaking the law.
Because that would be fair.
In the end, the hosts DIDN’T remove Lin Shuideng’s hosting account because of the theft of copyrighted work. No, they said they’d found mysterious “other issues” with it, which had forced them to remove it. I’m not sure what could be worse, in hosting terms, than stealing from 300 people, but whatever it was, it got them to take down the two sites that were ripping me off, to my great relief.
I say “relief”. To be honest, I’m still mad as hell about all of this. And not just because yet another working day was lost, spent fighting an intellectual property thief, rather than doing the work I’m so far behind with, but because I don’t feel justice can really be said to have been done here. Sure, Lin Shuideng will have woken up the next morning to find that his/her illegal websites had all vanished into the ether, and that must’ve been a bit of a bummer. But… that’s it. There are no other consequences for this person, who will surely just start again on another host. Three hundred illegal websites is not a small thing. It is not an insignificant thing (not in a business sense, anyway). It is large-scale theft, and yet it will go totally unpunished, and there will be absolutely nothing to prevent this person going on to do exactly the same thing again.
That’s the way it is, though. If someone steals your physical property, the law will protect you for free. If someone steals your intellectual property, the law will extract a large sum of money from you in order to protect you. If you don’t want to, or can’t afford to pay, the criminal will be allowed to go on breaking the law, and that’s not fair.
We’re now waiting for Lin Shuideng (or the NEXT Lin Shuideng) to pop up somewhere else, stealing more of our content. It was Shoeperwoman.com this time, but next time it could be TheFashionPolice.net, or it could be this site. Or it could be YOUR site. Isn’t that a worrying thought?
I just published the following statement over at Shoeperwoman, but figured good news bears repeating. And really, the sight of Rubin in shoes never really gets old, does it?
“Following on from the trademark dispute I told you about last month, I’m very pleased to announce that following negotiations between our lawyers and the owner of the Shoeper-Woman.co.uk website, we have now reached an agreement, in light of which the owner has rebranded, transferred domain ownership to us and withdrawn the Trademark application that conflicted with our website name.
Obviously this has been a difficult and stressful time for everyone involved, and we’re happy to be able to draw a line under it and get on with the important business of talking about shoes. Once again, we’d like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has supported us throughout this: we will now be continuing with our own trademark application, and hope that, if granted, this will help give our brand additional security in future.
Thanks again for everyone’s help and support: it really does mean the world to us.
P.S. As a courtesy towards the other party in this dispute, we have agreed not to name either her or her new business name, and we’d appreciate it if you could refrain from mentioning these names in the comments here.”
Unfortunately the fight DOES go on against the site I mentioned in yesterday’s post, which is still live at the time of writing, and I’m still completely mystified as to why on earth it even exists. My current tagline gets truer by the day…
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