Successful Blog

Plagiarism: How to Cope with Every Writer’s Worst Nightmare

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By Tiffany Matthews

Do you remember the first story you wrote? Throughout high school and college, I have often written short stories and poems for friends just for fun. Although these tales and poetry have accumulated over years, they remain as they are–scribblings in notebooks that have now gathered dust at the bottom of my drawer. Some of my friends think that it’s a waste, arguing that these stories should be shared with the world. In fact, they have suggested that I try my luck writing for sites like fictionpress.com. Many writers have gotten their lucky break from this site, signing authorship deals that have made their publishing dream a reality.

In the beginning, you might feel content enough to keep your writings private. But as time passes, you will feel this need to share these tales with others, hoping that they will touch others the way they have touched you. I, too, have felt this need for sharing stories but one worry has always held me back from posting them online–plagiarism.

Everyone is Vulnerable…

All writers are vulnerable to plagiarism. Although self-published authors may be more vulnerable, still, it doesn’t mean that those who publish with reputable publishers are safe from this. In fact, just recently, author Lorelei James’ work was plagiarized. Apparently, someone took All Jacked Up, a title from James’ Rough Riders series, and posted that book chapter per chapter on a free stories website. Everything was exactly the same save for the hero and heroine’s names.

So how can we protect ourselves from this?

Precautionary Measures

Plagiarism has been going on for a long time and this problem is not going to disappear overnight. For any writer who becomes a victim of this, it is one of the worst things that can ever happen to you. Those who love their craft know just how devastating it is for someone to steal their work and pass it off as his or her own. It is almost akin to losing a child. To protect the work of our hands and heart, it is necessary that we implement precautionary measures.

Copyright and Google

Since we know that plagiarism can happen at any given time, one of the things we can do is to register for a copyright. It will not stop a person from plagiarizing your works, but at least you will have sufficient ground for legal action. Copyright registration may vary from country to country so do some research before you do. If circumstances lead you to file to a lawsuit, you don’t need to worry about expensive lawyer fees. You can use prepaid legal plans, which can have budget friendly monthly subscriptions.

Once you have your copyright, you can then set up Google alerts regarding your work. Customize your alert to include your book title, quotes, book passages, your name and more so that you will be aware of news about your book. This will also make it easier to track if someone has been posting your stories elsewhere and claiming to own them.

Connections are Important

Fellow authors make great critics and friends especially if you can trust them. If you are able to form a solid network of writer friends, they will be your support when the issue of plagiarism crops up. They may even be influential in recognizing your work which is being passed off as another’s. You can seek their advice on how to proceed with filing a plagiarism case.

Be Assertive and Take Action

When your work is stolen, you feel violated because you were the one who birthed that literary masterpiece. If this does happen to you, don’t try to repress your emotions. Rant if you must but don’t do anything that would hurt your own reputation. Instead, you should buck up and take legal action. Don’t let this event keep you from writing again. Instead, learn from it and you’ll gain an even deeper appreciation for your work and other writers’ works.

Do you take any proactive steps to prevent plagiarism of your work?

Author’s Bio: Based in San Diego California, Tiffany Matthews is a professional writer with over 5 years of writing experience. She also blogs about travel, fashion, and anything under the sun at wordbaristas.com, a group blog that she shares with her good friends. In her free time, she likes to travel, read books, and watch movies. You can find her on Twitter as @TiffyCat87.

4 Key Time Management Tips for Even the Busiest Business Owner

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By Jennifer Dunn

Owning your own business is amazing, but there are times when it’s practically a nightmare. Sometimes it gets so hard you just want to give up and go back to a 9 to 5. This usually comes after you’ve tried and tried to catch up on tasks but can’t seem to find any time to keep your head above water, much less actually get ahead.

It doesn’t have to be like this! With a few simple tips you can turn your frazzled brain into a relaxed center of productivity. Don’t give up on your entrepreneurial dreams just yet – check out the following tips and see if any of them can help you.

Get Organized

This seems like an obvious thing to say, but it’s an important point to make nonetheless. Most business owners waste so much time searching around their office, store, or home for a paper or object that should’ve been properly stored away (think: tax time). Eventually you’ll waste so much time on this that other tasks fall to the wayside as you struggle to keep up.

Get an organizational process in place for whatever’s driving you nuts – for example, receipts should all go into a folder so you can find them easily. Alternatively you can use a service like Shoeboxed to digitize receipts for super easy retrieval. Are you always searching for files on your computer? Create a digital filing system. Do you spend hours resetting your passwords? Check out a password management system like LastPass.

Once you have this organization in place, keep it up! Don’t let it slip or you’ll go right back into your old habits.

Don’t Multitask

If you want to get more things done, common sense tells you should just do more things at once. This way you get done with tasks quicker, right? In fact, the evidence says otherwise – multitasking does more harm than good.

It’s all about spending energy – if you give 33% to three tasks, they may not turn out any better than if you spent 100% on one thing at a time. If something gets messed up, you just have to start over again anyway. Learn how to tackle one thing at a time properly so you don’t spread yourself thin. Welcome to “unitasking.”

Get Apps to Help

Tired of doing everything yourself? You may not be able to hire any help, but you can certainly afford to acquire some robots to aid you. Oh, you don’t have a connection to someone at a robotics factory? Then settle for the next best thing and grab some apps.

Whether you have a smartphone, a tablet, or laptop, there are hundreds of applications (and other software) you can grab to help you do simple tasks that eat up your time. Whether it’s financial tracking, task management, shopping lists, or a thousand other things, there’s a way to streamline it.

Step Away

Another bit of “common sense” that can get you into hot water is attempting to power through a task that’s driving you nuts. Once you get into the habit of doing everything yourself you tend to want to get it all out of the way as quickly as you can. However, like multitasking, this can actually do more harm than good.

Instead, take a nice break once in a while. Go outside, take a walk, play a game, read a book, or just stare at the wall – as long as it’s not about work. This break can not only give you a nice physical stretch it can free up your brain to come up with solutions to your problems quickly.

What are your time management tips for time strapped business owners?

Author’s Bio: Jennifer Escalona Dunn is the owner of Social Street Media where she writes about small business, tech and finance for sites like WePay and Outright. You can find her on Twitter @jennescalona.

How do you label yourself?

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When I was in 8th grade, my math teacher had a tradition of writing down little pithy comments about each student for the yearbook. She read them out loud at the end of the year, in front of the whole class. Her quote about me was: “pretty, pert little lady with an unexpected smile.”

It’s been 35 years since she gifted me with that observation, and it has stuck with me all this time. The power of labels runs deep.

But labels can either empower you or disable you—it’s your choice. How you identify yourself to the world, and how others publicly identify you, makes a big impact on your success. If you commit to a label strongly enough, behavioral science tells us that others will reinforce that label as well.

Labeling behavior happens applies to you as a business person, as well as your website or blog. Don’t forget to clarify your website’s purpose while you’re considering your own “tagline.”

How you label yourself

When you tell someone about your business, or your job, do you use the word “just” (e.g.,, “I’m just a blogger”) or do you minimize your accomplishments (e.g., “I run a small marketing agency—you’ve probably never heard of us”)? Stop doing that.

Be ready with a memorable response when someone asks you what you do for a living. “I’m the creative force behind ABC Agency,” or “I dish out innovative PR advice on a daily basis at the ABC Blog” or “I’m a wild and crazy guy!”

How others label you

Are you paying attention to how others describe you in conversation or online when they introduce you? Do other people know what your secret sauce is, well enough to relay it to others?

Try this experiment today: go ask a few people how they would introduce you at a networking event. Get a nice sampling from your family, a friend, a colleague, and an online acquaintance. I’ll bet the results are revealing!

Use your new “personal tagline” in your online profiles, bios for your guest posts, and corporate marketing materials. Use it when anyone asks you what you do. Remember, it’s perfectly acceptable to evolve your tagline over time.

And don’t forget to smile.

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Tips on Building the Confidence to Grow Your Business

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By Phil Buckley

My first experience with small business owners was in the late 80s. I was an operations manager for Zack’ Famous Frozen Yogurt, a franchise chain experiencing massive growth. My role was to set up new stores and help franchisees manage them successfully.

I was inspired by each owner’s courage, determination and passion to win. They tackled challenges head-on and typically took a glass half-full approach to managing problems.

However, when presented with opportunities to change or expand their businesses, I noticed that many owners lacked the confidence to get to the next level. They were comfortable with what they knew, and uncomfortable with what they didn’t know. Often, they’d forgo opportunities without fully exploring the benefits because their personal uncertainty was stronger than their desire for greater success.

As my career progressed into business training and then change management, I observed that most leaders struggled with change. Their confidence was tested most when their operational experience didn’t help them assess and pursue new opportunities or manage challenges. In those circumstances, what had made them successful had little impact on their ability to manage well.

Over time, it became apparent to me that the key to managing change (offering new products, entering new markets, opening a new location, etc.) is confidence.

Here are three ways that small business owners (and any business leader for that matter) can build their confidence when they uncover big opportunities to grow their businesses:

Make a list of the skills you used when making past successful changes

Small business owners will benefit from taking stock of past accomplishments and the skills they used to achieve them. Listing them in writing will help you build a playbook on how to manage new opportunities – steps to take, advice to get, behaviors to demonstrate, etc. Studying your past successes will help you create a path towards your goal and identify the capabilities you need to get there.

Identify who you can call upon for help

Peer support is a key enabler of evolving a business. Wise small business leaders ask for help, especially when opportunities require a departure from their current business model. Learning about how similar situations were managed, both successfully and unsuccessfully, will provide practical guidance on what you need to do, what to watch out for and how to act.

Write a solid plan

Business plans help small business owners stay focused and manage time and resources productively. They provide a means against which to track progress and a working tool to adjust as new information becomes available. A wise person once said, “Create the plan, work the plan, change the plan.” A growth opportunity business plan provides a map to confidently navigate.

It can be difficult to manage and grow a small business. With the right skills, knowledge, advice and plan, the small business owner can take the next step on their businesses journey and reach the next level of personal success. Have confidence!

Author’s Bio: Phil Buckley is a senior change management professional with nearly twenty-five years of experience helping individuals, teams and organizations deliver change in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Phil writes about managing change at www.changewithconfidence.com. He is also author of Change with Confidence: Answers to the 50 Biggest Questions that keep Change Leaders Up at Night (Jossey-Bass), where he provides complete, actionable answers to the fifty burning questions that leaders routinely ask about how to manage change successfully. Follow him on Twitter @philbuckley01.

Five Stimulating Ideas to Spark Your Creative Juices

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Have you ever found yourself staring at the screen, mindlessly sipping coffee, hoping that the caffeine will jump start a creative idea? Perhaps you’ve fallen victim to “the creativity crisis.” Or perhaps you just need a little slap upside the head.

Consider this your friendly nudge (my mom told me slapping isn’t nice).

Chris Brogan’s Blog Topics
If you’d like a dash of community with your writing prompts, Chris Brogan’s blog topics is your place. For $97.00, you’ll get 45 weeks of email newsletter updates with 10 or more blog topic ideas, writing advice, and more.

Mindmapping (Biggerplate or MindMeister)
Sometimes what you really need is to write things down and organize your thoughts. I’ve found that a creative block can happen like a logjam, where you have too many different ideas. Using a mindmap tool can break the logjam by getting some of the ideas out of your brain and into a repository. Both of these tools also offer access to community mindmaps…maybe someone else’s mindmap will spark an idea for you!

Unstuck App
If your primary issue is being “blocked” in general, the free Unstuck App comes to the rescue with a step by step action plan for moving forward. It doesn’t matter if your block is creative, emotional, work-related, or otherwise, this beautifully designed app will nudge you out of inertia.

Get creatively unstuck

Tour the Louvre Online
Step outside of your routine online, and visit a place that contains the creative juices of generations. Schedule 30 minutes with yourself, and wander around virtually, exploring the museum with no crowds moving you along. Sometimes getting away from your same-old industry blogs will get you thinking in a new direction.

Prompts
This is a very simple creative writing app that does one thing effectively–it offers hundreds of prompts and opening lines to jog your creative brain. Extra goodies are kept very minimal; there is a sharing tool, writing reminders, and habit tracking feature to discover your best days and times to write. If you have trouble staring at a blank page, this one might give you that little nudge you need. It’s $3.99 in the iTunes store.

What are your secret weapons for getting out of a creative block?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Tips to Effectively Optimize Your Website with Multivariate Testing

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By Ruben Corbo

If you follow the branding convention adopted by most large companies, you’d note a uniform application of key branding elements, such as logo, slogan and trademarks across all their corporate websites. Big business also optimizes all forms of online interaction, be they blog, social media profiles or corporate portals. To optimize your website, you also can implement tactics that larger players use, provided you adopt a few essential tips and perform multivariate testing thoroughly.

Basics of Multivariate Testing

In multivariate testing, you select specific attributes of your website and test them simultaneously. This technique is also called “multi-variable testing” or “multi-variable assessment,” and the variables here refer to the website’s attributes. These include user-friendliness, design, layout, compatibility with smart phones, and browsing requirements—say, browser type and security level, depending on the page a user is reading. Unlike multivariate testing, A/B testing only focuses on two operational scenarios and assesses a single attribute.

Website Optimization 101

Also known as portal enhancement, website optimization covers the mishmash of things—say, esthetic, programming and security—that a company does to elevate the stature of its website in search engine rankings, increase conversion rates and generate cash in the long term. To perform website optimization, adopt a tactic that fits your budget and operational model. You either do it yourself or use online tools to help you convert traffic to online sales. You also can hire an SEO specialist to analyze your content and search ranks, track conversion rates, and rummage in the website’s data to understand what’s going on from an optimization standpoint.

Running Effective Multivariate Tests

To run an effective multivariate test, you should understand not only the fundamentals of the test but also things like usage requirements and testing steps.

Usage Requirements

You typically would need multivariate testing if you operate a highly trafficked, complex website with stringent coding requirements and security layers. This type of testing is also suitable if you want to improve the “look and feel” of the portal, an element that becomes as important as ever for a site that experiences heaving readership on a daily basis. For a modest-traffic portal, such as blog or personal website, I recommend A/B testing instead.

Testing Steps

Follow these steps to run an effective and efficient multivariate test, but remember again that you can use online tools or hire an expert if you run a complex operation or simply need to have a specialist coordinate the assessment.

  1. Evaluate your website to determine what must be fixed.
  2. Set the way you want to test batches, specifying such attributes as user-friendliness, security, information and “look and feel.”
  3. Choose test variations.
  4. Run the multivariate test.
  5. Analyze results and decide whether a new test is needed to confirm the results.
  6. Implement the results on your website—that is, fix or improve it according to the results.

Take-Away

Believe it or not, your website says a lot about your company, how seriously you take online commerce, and the operational importance you ascribe to the comfort of readers, shoppers and your existing customers. So adopt effective measures to optimize your corporate portal. In a digital era in which the first impression invariably counts, it is in your company’s economic interests to design and deploy an attractive yet informative website. Multivariate testing can help in this process, but make sure you do your homework in advance, apply specific steps, and glean relevant information from specialized portals.

Author’s Bio: Ruben Corbo is a freelance writer that writes about technology, gaming, music, and online marketing especially topics about A/B Testing and multivariate testing. Ruben has written several online marketing articles related to the topic of converting traffic to sales which you can find out more novice information on Maxymiser. When Ruben is not writing he is composing and producing music for short films and other visual arts.