Reposting Other People’s Blog Content Is A Quick Way To Blog Failure, Not Success

I just came across an article over at Lee Odden’s TopRankBlog.com by one of his contributors entitled ‘4 Ways to Successfully Re-Post Others Content’.

Re-Posting other peoples content is a great way to feel included in a conversation and get additional traffic. However, simply copying their post word for word won’t give any additional value to your visitors. So here are 4 ways to successfully re-post someone else’s content.

I do believe the author of this post isn’t saying “steal other people’s content for a quick, easy way to blog success”. However, I do think that some bloggers may take it that way. When I read the piece, that’s how it came off to me.

And looking at a few of the comments, I think it did to others.

Comment example 1: Thanks for this article. Re-posting is key to any successful blog.

Comment example 2: Very good tips. People think they have to come up with content from scratch and it kills their blog productivity. “Riffing” off of others is what the blogosphere uses to take a bit of a break and hand kudos out to the latest person in their ’sphere to do the hard part: from scratch!

The fear here is that new bloggers will read this and think that reposting blog content is a way to build a strong audience. It’s not. You build a strong readership through original content, with the occasional “hop-on” and attibute to someone else’s original content. (Just like I’m doing here).

I think the problem with his post is the headline and the word “reposting”. Reposting to me sounds like scraping and stealing. The copyblogger could help out here perhaps.

The moral of this story? Think carefully about the words you choose to express a meaning in your blogs.