If you read any of my other blogs, or follow me on any of the approximately 1,763,345 social networks I’m currently part of, you will probably already know that I’ve spent the last 24 hours shamelessly begging people to join the new Shoe Community over at Shoeperwoman.com, which Terry has very cleverly created.
If you DON’T already know I’ve been doing that, then all I can say is DAMN, people, where you been? Do you even GO here?
That’s also the main reason my posts here have been so sporadic recently: the new Challenge/Community has basically involved a complete re-launch of the site, and while Terry’s been busy with that, I’ve been busy rocking back and forth in the corner, going, “OMG, what if everyone hates it, WHAT IF?” These fears are only partly unfounded: last year we made a minor change to the layout of TheFashionPolice.net, and there are people currently using that site who STILL don’t think Terry and I should be alive today because of it (I’m only exaggerating a little bit), so, yeah, I was completely terrified.
Luckily, we seem to have (mostly) got away with it so far: it launched yesterday, and already has almost 70 active members, and only two complaints so far, so I think we’re doing not too badly. Obviously I’ve now cursed this project with my optimism, though, and will wake up tomorrow to a barrage of emails from people who’d like me to just go and ahead and kill myself, please. Which I guess will make a nice change from the barrage of emails about Kelly Osbourne’s hair. (Seriously, I got two of them on Sunday: both huge rants about Kelly Osbourne, both assuming that I have some kind of hotline to KO, or am somehow able to hold her down and dye her hair. Which I’m not, just to clarify. )
(Hilariously, one of the people who emailed me had an email signature which declared “educating others” to be “his life’s mission”. Maybe should’ve educated himself about who is Kelly Osbourne and who is Forever Amber, first, huh?)
Anyway! I was writing about the new community on Twitter, or Facebook, or TwitFace, or wherever the hell it was, and I sez to myself, I sez, “Amber, why are the Forever Amber readers missing out on this exciting piece of news? Why are you allowing the fact that most of them don’t actually give a crap about shoes to stand in the way of you pimping out your new community, like the pimpiest pimp who ever pimped?” And I thought, “You know, that’s true. I will write a post about it this very day.” And here it is. If you could try to look interested, that would be awesome.
So, folks, I have a new Shoe Community, which is the epicentre of the next Shoeper Shoe Challenge. (If you don’t know what that is, this post isn’t for you. Just scroll on by, soldier…) If you like shoes, you could join it. If you DON’T like shoes – and I’m told that there are, indeed, some people who have chosen to adopt this strange position, a bit like people who persist in believing that the world is really flat and that Justin Beiber is sexy – you could tell your shoe lovin’ friends about it instead. “Shoe lovin’ friends,” you could say, “Why are you not a member of the Shoeper Shoe Community? Are you crazy?”
Oh, and the fact that the Shoe Challenge is once again underway means that I’m back to doing this again:
I wear the green things so you don’t have to. You are very welcome.
Hi, I'm Amber. I'm a full-time fashion/shoe blogger from the UK, and this is the story of my life, my clothes, and the International Man of Mystery Next Door. You can read more from me at my other blogs, The Fashion Police and Shoeperwoman.
Thanks to my position as the most copied woman on the internet, I get a lot of questions about how to deal with blog copying, so I figured it might be useful for me to write a post about it, to try and help other bloggers in the same boat.
(Is anyone else imagining a boat full of bloggers now? Can you even IMAGINE what that would be like? They’d all be Tweeting, and Instagram-ing and asking each other to take their outfit photos aaaallll day long!)
Then I thought, “Actually, you know what, I’m wordy. I will need a few posts to say what a better writer would probably be able to say in one. Please excuse this lengthy post, everyone: I didn’t have time to write a shorter one…
(This image has helped countless people sell pairs of those boots on eBay. If only I got commission!)
This is the first part of a short(ish) series, then, and I’m starting off with the first, and most frequent question I’m always asked about this:
How do you know when your content has been stolen?
Sometimes, of course, you just DON’T know. This is the thing that bothers me most. For every website I find which is infringing my copyright by stealing my words and pictures, there are probably lots more I DON’T know about. There are, however, a few different methods I’ve used to identify sploggers, plagiarists and image thieves, and probably quite a lot more that I haven’t used, and which you’re more than welcome to tell me about : every little helps, after all, in the war against thieving b******s.
(If you could all imagine me delivering that last line in the manner of Braveheart, please, that would be awesome.)
(Imagine me looking like Angelina Jolie, though, not like Mel Gibson.)
(Angelina BEFORE the whole “leg” thing happened, I mean.)
In a lot of cases for me, and in every single one of the “Amber Impersonator” cases (i.e. people pretending to BE me, as opposed to people stealing my content) it has come down to pure luck, and I’ve found out about it only because some kind person has emailed me to tell me about it, having either recognised my photo, or become suspicious about the person using it and done a bit of detective work. The same is true of the eBay sellers who use photos of me to sell their clothes, although some of those I’ve stumbled upon myself, purely by chance. (I’ll be searching eBay for “green dress”, say, and hey, there’s me! Damn. I have a lot of green dresses…)
Of course, some impersonators are too clever to hotlink the image directly from my blog, or not change the filename to something other than “Forever Amber”, and sometimes they’re going to use the image on a site where no one will recognise it. This is when you need to look to other methods to find the lowlife. Here are some I’ve used:
Google Images allows you to upload your image and search for duplicates, or images which are similar to it. For instance, I uploaded this image:
and here’s what I got:
Which tells me that this image ONLY appears here and on Shoeperwoman.com, which is also my blog: whew!
The “similar images” results were a revelation, too:
I’m similar to Showaddywaddy? SERIOUSLY?
OK, so obviously it isn’t perfect. But it is pretty good, and if you suspect an image might have been copied, Google Images will help you find out for sure. The big problem with it is that it’s down to you to do the searching: I have four blogs, and they contain thousands of images between them – I’m obviously not going to upload them all every day just to see if they’ve been stolen, so although helpful, this isn’t a complete solution.
Google Alerts is a system whereby you set up “alerts” for certain words or phrases, and are emailed every time that word of phrase is mentioned on the web: so you’d set up an alert for your own name, say, or your website name or brand. You can also just type your search term into the Google Alerts page and view results for that day:
(The book isn’t about me. I do sometimes have to use my wits, beauty and courage to climb to the highest position, though. OK, not my beauty. Or my courage, really. And I don’t often have my wits about me. Amber St. Clare would totally beat me in a fight, to be honest.)
Up until last year, I didn’t really use Google alerts at all. I’d tried it out briefly when I first heard about it, and had found that it would occasionally direct me to forums or blog posts where people were discussing me, and honestly, I’d just rather not know what kind of things people say about me “behind my back”, as it were. An eavesdropper rarely hears any good of themselves, as they say, and it just seemed a bit vain to want to know about every single person who dared to speak my name.
After the whole “Shoeperwoman” fiasco went down, though, I realised that I couldn’t really afford NOT to pay attention to Google Alerts. In that case, the copycat was actually trying to trademark my brand name: if we hadn’t found out about it when we did (and, again, I found out about that one because someone emailed me asking if it was me) we could have missed the window of opportunity in which you’re able to oppose a trademark application, and she’d have won the right to the name.
These days, we use Google Alerts for a number of different words or phrases connected to our blogs: they go to Terry, who has the joy of going through them every day and reading a bunch of stuff about shoes, and women’s fashion, plus the occasional forum thread in which people discuss how I don’t have enough shoes. (No, really.) Lucky Terry!
We’ve found that the key to using Google alerts to track down plagiarists is to not just restrict yourself to your name or your blog name, but to try to include other words or phrases which would identify your text: for instance, on this site, I don’t really tend to write my full name on all of my posts (I hardly ever do, in fact), or even the name of the blog, so if those were the only phrases I was receiving alerts for, it would be pretty easy for someone to steal the content without me knowing. Some people actually include specific words or pieces of text in every single post, for this very reason: for a while, each of my posts on TheFashionPolice.net and Shoeperwoman had a short piece of text which was automatically added to it, and which was the subject of the Google alert: we found Lin Shiudeng, and a few other sploggers using this method.
(Someone once posted this photo, with the complete text of the post which accompanied it, on their own blog. They cropped out my watermark, but put in a link back to me: when I asked them to remove it, they said they “thought it was an interesting story” and didn’t realise they weren’t allowed to just copy and paste it in its entirety.)
Copyscape is a really great tool which allows you to type your URL into a search box and find out if any copies of it exist on the web. As with the Google Images check, this could be laborious work if you have a lot of sites, but there’s also a paid-for version which automatically scans the web for copies of your work: I haven’t tried this, so I can’t recommend it personally, but it certainly sounds like a useful tool.
4. Pingbacks
If you’re a blogger, you’re probably familiar with “pingbacks”, which are a system whereby when someone links to a post, you get a notification, normally in the form of an automated comment with a link to the other post. I’ve discovered several copyright infringements of my sites because of this: you wouldn’t think it would be the least bit helpful for people who steal content from you to link back to you, but here’s the thing: THEY DO. What I’ve found is that a lot of new (and some established) bloggers operate under the belief that it’s OK to use someone else’s images or text as long as they link back to the source. So they steal my image, they type “Image: www.foreveramber.co.uk” under it, and I get a pingback telling me where to find it. Awesome.
Also, if you tend to deep-link to other pages on your site from your posts (i.e this post contains a number of links back to other articles on this blog), someone who copies and pastes the entire text will often inadvertently copy the links, too: I’ve found lots of copied posts as the result of a pingback from the infringing site, which hasn’t realised the copied post linked to other pages on my site: ha!
The message: If you’re worried about people copying you, check in your admin panel and make sure you have pingbacks enabled: not only will they help you find some of your stolen images, they’ll also tell you when someone has linked to you. Which is nice. When they’re not copying you, of course.
5. Your stats package
Most bloggers have some kind of statistics package which tells them how much traffic their site gets, where it comes from, etc: I use Google Analytics, but there are lots of different tools which do the same thing. Keep an eye on these stats, and particularly on where your traffic is coming from, because this is another good way to find out if you’ve been copied, especially in cases where your content has been copied and pasted in its entirety, or by a scraping script rather than an actual person. If someone has hotlinked an image, for instance, you may see an unusual amount of traffic going to that image on your server, in which case your stats package should tell you where it’s coming from.
The stats will also give you lots of other interesting information, like how many people have found your blog as a result of a Google search for the phrase: “I hate gingers, I hope they all die.” Answer: A LOT.
Aaaaand, that’s all I can think of for now. What would be really funny would be if THIS post was copied now, wouldn’t it? Don’t worry, it probably will be…
(Coming soon: how to stop people stealing your content in the first place.)
Hi, I'm Amber. I'm a full-time fashion/shoe blogger from the UK, and this is the story of my life, my clothes, and the International Man of Mystery Next Door. You can read more from me at my other blogs, The Fashion Police and Shoeperwoman.
It’s been a while since I last caught(y) someone doing “a McNaughty”, so for the benefit of those just joining us, hi, I’m Amber and I’m the most-imitated woman on the Internet! You can find a full list of all the people who have impersonated or ripped me off here: read it and weep, folks! (God knows, I sometimes do.)
Anyway, as I was saying, it’s been a long time since I last wrote about my copycats, so you’ve probably been thinking, “Gosh, people must have finally given up on relentlessly copying Amber: that’s nice!” Or, I mean, you probably HAVEN’T been thinking that at all, but if you had, you’d be wrong: people have, indeed, been continuing to steal my images and text (mostly on eBay), it’s just that it happens so often that it’s not really worth mentioning most of the time. Until now, that is.
Sunday night, as you probably all know, was Oscars night, a.k.a The Worst Night of Amber’s Year. Because I have a website about fashion, I am obliged to write about the Oscars red carpet, and because I’m not a filthy rotten image thief, I buy all of the images I require to do this from an image agency. With money. Money that I work for, and which I can’t spend on shoes and green dresses once I’ve spent it on image licences for my website. Boo hoo, woe is me!
On Oscar night, however, my image agency messed up. I sat up late, waiting for the images to come in, and, when they didn’t, I set my alarm and got up early the next morning. And the images still weren’t available. So I freaked out, and then Gemma told me I could get (legal) images from the PR Section of the Academy Awards website, so I did that, then my own agency coughed up the goods too, and I spent basically the entire day editing photos and writing text to accompany them.
Then I got up the next morning and discovered that some other website had just stolen all the posts and republished them, so all of those hours of work, all of those images, and all of the money I had spent purchasing them, had not, as I had imagined, been done to benefit my own business and website, but had been done to benefit someone ELSE’S.
Which was… yeah.
It’s OK, though: I mean, they didn’t actually COPY me. Oh no. I mean, compare this, from my site:
With this, from the plagiarist, I mean “person who just happened to write exactly the same thing, but in Pidgin English, because that totally makes it OK”:
Occasional actress. My Few Days With Marilyn. Your woman. The night-time.
Let’s just admit it: this is funnier than what I wrote, isn’t it? Only I don’t think that was the intention somehow.
There’s more:
Oh yah, totally: thus boom about trend! I SO know what you mean! Except, not really. I don’t think ANYONE would know what this meant, if it weren’t for my helpful translation above, which has obviously been run through some kind of software designed to replace certain words with other ones.
(In other news, I think my next tagline will be “One ruffle lacking any seventies bedspread.” Catchy, no? Orange can make it!)
There’s even more, too: this company has copied lots of my posts – I actually don’t know the full extent of it yet, because I had to stop counting in order to come here and take the crap out of them – and posts from other bloggers, too. My guess is that they think the fact that they’re re-writing the text makes it OK, so here is a newsflash for them, and for anyone else thinking, “You know what: I’d like to make money from blogging, but I can’t be assed doing any work or investing any money in it, so I think what I’ll do is, I’ll let AMBER do the work and spend the money, and then I’ll just steal it!”:
NEWSFLASH: RE-WRITING MY CONTENT IN THE MANNER OF AN (ADMITTEDLY HILARIOUS) NON-ENGLISH SPEAKER DOES NOT MAKE IT OK TO COPY ME. Or anyone else, for that matter.
This is plagiarism, pure and simple. I’ve done the work, now this company is profiting from it. (And I found the copycat site because I was Googling for info on Oscars fashion, and it came up in the search results before mine. So this site is stealing my work AND my traffic, just in case you were thinking this kind of thing doesn’t matter, or that it’s an essentially victimless crime.)
I’m not really concerned about the images on this particular post, because they’re ones I got from the Oscars’ press section, and anyone who is registered there would have access to them. They’ve also stolen images which I paid my agency for, though, and that REALLY rankles with me – as it does when any blogger takes images I’ve paid for – because images aren’t cheap, and I hate feeling like I’m paying for something just so other bloggers can use it for free. I’m willing to pay for my OWN images, but I don’t see why I should pay for yours too.
(Incidentally, this is another reason why it’s not nice to steal images. Someone had to pay for them. They didn’t pay for them FOR YOU. And some photographer DIDN’T get paid for your use of them. Not cool.)
We will probably be able to get Google to remove our content from this site (we always have before), once we’ve worked out exactly how much of it they’ve used. I’m not going to link to them because I don’t want to send them the traffic, but if you’re thinking it might be called “Fashion Trends for 2012″, then you are thinking right: please don’t reward it with clicks! And if you wrote any coverage of The Oscars this week, or celebrity fashion in general, there’s a good chance your re-written content is on it too.
I leave you with one of my favourite automatic re-writes of my text:
I said I liked Flower Byrne’s “bob”. They said they liked her “frank”. And I said her dress was black, but what was I thinking? That dress is AFRICAN AMERICAN, people. I hang my head in shame.
(Is it wrong that I want to ask them which program they’re using to do this? I’m thinking my blog would be MUCH funnier if I ran my posts through it too…)
Hi, I'm Amber. I'm a full-time fashion/shoe blogger from the UK, and this is the story of my life, my clothes, and the International Man of Mystery Next Door. You can read more from me at my other blogs, The Fashion Police and Shoeperwoman.
Just in case any of you were worried that my recent silence is a sign that the ghost which switches our TV on and knocks over our posters had taken more drastic action against Terry and I, I’m here to report that all is well. And, I mean, it’s not like there’s been any other spooky occurrences to suggest there’s a ghost in the house, maybe in the region of the front door, say:
(Um, please excuse the quality and shakiness of this video – I filmed it on my phone, late at night. I was also probably drunk.)
Seriously, he stood like this, staring intently at absolutely nothing, repeatedly that night. And no, there was nothing outside (that was visible to the human eye) and no mysterious sounds (that our human ears could pick up), so the question remains: WHAT DOES HE SEE? Is it dead people? And are they likely to try to posses us any time soon, I wonder?
Actually, there’s a small part of me right now that’s secretly wishing there WAS a ghost in the house, or that I could become possessed by a demon or something (Note: Not really. That’s not an invitation, o spirits of the netherworld! Begone from this house!). It would at least break the monotony, and give me something to write about here, wouldn’t it? Because here’s the thing, not that you particularly care: I haven’t bee quite lately because of ghostly presences in our home, but just because there is absolutely nothing to see here, folks, move along please. I have, of course, been continuing to blog elsewhere, because that’s what pays the bills, but actually, I think that’s part of the problem: I write about fashion at The Fashion Police, about shoes at Shoeperwoman and (occasionally) about makeup at Hey, Dollface! and it doesn’t really leave much left over to write about here.
Of course, this blog has always been that most awkward of genres: the personal journal. It’s supposed to just be about my life. But really, all that’s been happening in my life right now is that I write about fashion, shoes and makeup, and… that’s it. So things may be quiet around here for a while. Or, then again, they may not, because normally what happens is that I promise I won’t be blogging much, and then I suddenly discover that I have so! much! to! say! and you’re stuck with even MORE of me, instead.
Hi, I'm Amber. I'm a full-time fashion/shoe blogger from the UK, and this is the story of my life, my clothes, and the International Man of Mystery Next Door. You can read more from me at my other blogs, The Fashion Police and Shoeperwoman.
(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”…
Hi, I'm Amber. I'm a full-time fashion/shoe blogger from the UK, and this is the story of my life, my clothes, and the International Man of Mystery Next Door. You can read more from me at my other blogs, The Fashion Police and Shoeperwoman.
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…
Hi, I'm Amber. I'm a full-time fashion/shoe blogger from the UK, and this is the story of my life, my clothes, and the International Man of Mystery Next Door. You can read more from me at my other blogs, The Fashion Police and Shoeperwoman.
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…
Hi, I'm Amber. I'm a full-time fashion/shoe blogger from the UK, and this is the story of my life, my clothes, and the International Man of Mystery Next Door. You can read more from me at my other blogs, The Fashion Police and Shoeperwoman.
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?
Hi, I'm Amber. I'm a full-time fashion/shoe blogger from the UK, and this is the story of my life, my clothes, and the International Man of Mystery Next Door. You can read more from me at my other blogs, The Fashion Police and Shoeperwoman.
(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?”
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
Hi, I'm Amber. I'm a full-time fashion/shoe blogger from the UK, and this is the story of my life, my clothes, and the International Man of Mystery Next Door. You can read more from me at my other blogs, The Fashion Police and Shoeperwoman.
Hi, I'm Amber. I'm a full-time fashion/shoe blogger from the UK, and this is the story of my life, my clothes, and the International Man of Mystery Next Door. You can read more from me at my other blogs, The Fashion Police and Shoeperwoman.
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
