If you ever seen any content written or any other type of content on the web with my name on it, then I was the one who wrote it. In fact, even though there is over 1,000 blog posts here on my blog and over 100 pages of online marketing, SEO, social media, and domain name content here on this website, I wrote it all. There was a time a few years when I accepted a few guest blog posts, but they always had the other writer’s name on them. And, by the way, those have all been removed from the site. So what you see now is what you get: content written by me.
It seems as though the internet marketing, social media, SEO, and content marketing industries (can we call it one industry now, called website marketing?) have a real bad habit of outsourcing content to others, and even seems as if there are a lot of “experts” out there who are outsourcing content more than ever now. And they’re putting their own name on it.
If a piece of content has YOUR name on it, then you must take full responsibility for it.
And there have a been quite a few posts that I regret posting, some I’ve taken down and you never really saw them because people involved with what I was wrote about made a fuss. So I took the content down, no problem. I always take full responsibility for all the content that has my name on it (Bill Hartzer), and, like it or not, I never have outsourced content and I never will.
Sure, it would be easy to pay someone $50 or $100 (or more) to create some great content, put my name on it, and then get all sorts of great recognition from having written it. But that’s not my style, and it never will be. When my upcoming book(s) are out, they’re not going to have been written by a ghost writer. I will personally write the content.
If your content has issues, or if it even ends up being a case of plagiarism, then take full responsibility for it. There’s been an unfortunate case of someone who has been highly respected for many years (even by me) who was just called out, publicly, for plagiarizing content.
This case is very unfortunate for both parties involved, and the one doing the plagiarizing is going to have his reputation dragged through the dirt. Already I can see several people in my industry now having a different perspective, and will probably not be highly respected as he once was in the past.
I know that everyone isn’t a prolific writer or blogger like I am (yes, people have called me that in the past). I have been writing content for 35 years, and was a technical writer, writing technical software manuals on IBM mainframe computers in the early 1990s for several years–so I can typically generate more written content, faster, than a lot of people. I understand that some people are not writers, and never will be. That’s fine. So outsource to a great writer and concentrate on what you do best (whatever you do). But if you’re going to do that, read every single word that is written, then edit that content before it’s posted publicly in your name.
After all, your reputation is on the line.