10 B2B Blogging Ideas For When You Need a Boost

B2B content is increasingly being considered as a useful way to drive traffic to company websites. Among the challenges found in B2B blogging is coming up with fresh ideas and subsequent content that will make your company’s messages appealing and engaging to your audience.

So, what is a B2B blogger in a bind to do? This is a list I have put together with 10 B2B blogging ideas. My list is by no means inclusive or in any sort of order of importance. I’ve decided to put it together because sometimes we could all use a boost.


1. Lists

My personal favorite, in case you couldn’t tell. There are so many ways to use lists for B2B blogging. Lists have a double benefit in that they are not only rather easy to put together, but they also can drive home some key points to your audience in a feasible, simple-to-digest format.

2. “How To”

This is good idea for bloggers who may have specific knowledge pertaining to a topic within their specific industries or specialties. It provides them the opportunity to share and educate their readers.


3. Industry News

Current events within your industry is probably among the lowest of the “low-hanging fruit” for fresh content. An added benefit in using news as content can be that it can provide your audience with a certain confidence that your business is up-to-date with the latest happenings.


4. Images and/or Videos as Content

We’ve all heard the expression by now that a picture is worth a thousand words. If you’re a B2B blogger in need of a boost, you can find any number of opportunities to put that expression to the test. Pinterest and YouTube are ripe with useful options.


5. Case Studies

Has your business accomplished a “win” recently? This type of post in your company blog will provide a bit of advertising as well as showcase the solutions that have been helpful and successful to other businesses.

6. Community Involvement

Does your company get involved in volunteer activities within its community? Posts that cover events where a company’s employees have spent time and/or financial gifts for charitable purposes often strike positive chords with its audience. They can see them as more human and caring.

7. Guest Blogs

B2B is diverse. Sometimes it helps to have posts from people with different points of view – or even entirely different types of marketing philosophies – than your company. The results can provide a certain balance and even synergy within your company’s current B2B blogging style.


8. Editorializing

It is common practice for bloggers to comment on one another’s posts. Using this idea and taking it a step beyond can create a brand new post. An editorial, if you will, to a similar post in your industry can be entertaining to your audience. Just don’t forget to reference the original in your post.

9. Results from Crowdsourcing

Have you have noticed certain trends within your B2B social media communities and blogs? Running polls or asking open-ended questions about them in your communities can be excellent sources of blog fodder. The results may answer your questions, as well as those of your audience.

10. Story-telling

I mentioned earlier that B2B topics may not be “sexy,” but they don’t have to be boring either. Sometimes just putting certain details into words your own way, with your own personality, can go a long way with your audience. Everyone likes a good story that appeals to them on some level.

I would love to hear which B2B blogging – or any other blogging ideas – that have worked best for you when you’re in a bind.

Come on, be honest. You can agree that the following scenario happens to all of us at one time or another – or probably more than one time – as bloggers. Your brain and the keyboard just can’t seem to connect. Deadline or not, you are incapable of making it happen the way you want. The harder you try, the more frustrated you become. 

 Then, you just give up for a while and move over to look at all the pretty pictures on Pinterest. Oh, wait – that’s what happens to me! B2B blogging admittedly comes with its own unique challenges. Let’s face it, the solutions and offerings are just not very “sexy” in the B2B world. That doesn’t mean B2B blogging isn’t necessary – it’s quite the opposite actually. 

Tags: YouTube, Pinterest, Blogging, Ideas, Blogs

4 Reasons Your Marketing May Not Work

We talk to people all the time who complain that their marketing isn’t working as well as they would like it to work. Every business–regardless of size, budget or industry–has likely felt this way before. Even very profitable businesses that succeed in most areas have failed at marketing before.


So here’s the question: why do we sometimes fail at marketing? What goes wrong?


Certainly, no two marketing campaigns are exactly the same. No two marketing strategies are exactly the same. There is no ‘silver bullet’ answer to the questions above. However, based on our discussions with many different companies, there are a few overarching reasons marketing strategies don’t work. Here they are:


1. Measurement #Fail

Most marketers simply don’t measure their marketing as carefully as they should. Perhaps they measure one area closely, like web traffic or conversion rates. However, they fail to effectively measure social media engagement or track phone calls. Without these metrics, marketers are flying blind. They can’t optimize. They can’t even make future decisions about that marketing channel.

Data is power. If you want to optimize your marketing you have to gather data. Most often the data that marketers ignore is related to phone calls. There is a huge amount of data available within phone calls. Are you taking advantage of that data to optimize your marketing?

2. Goal #Fail

When you launch a campaign, or redesign your website what is your goal? Do you want more visitors? Do you want more phone calls? Do you want people to download more content or follow you on Facebook? What are you trying to accomplish?

Sadly, very few marketers even bother to answer this question. Take, for example, redesigning a website. Most companies simply start the redesign process without actually considering what they want the redesign to actually accomplish. Marketers should really ask the following questions: How many more callers will this website generate? How many more clicks will it produce? How many more conversions and leadds will it generate each week?

Have a goal.

3. Lack of Marketing Diversity

Don’t just to do one thing. Do many things. Some companies get so married to a certain marketing strategy that it is almost creepy. They believe that only email marketing will work. They believe that only content marketing will work. They believe that only PPC ads or SEO will work. And when presented with data that contradicts their beliefs, they ignore the information. You should never have the answers before you ask the questions. Instead, try a bunch of different stuff and then use the data to tell you what works.

4. No Aggressiveness

Most organizations are, frankly, not very aggressive. They ignore leads unless they are a ‘perfect’ fit. Or, they simply throw leads into a nurture email campaign and forget about them altogether.

This is bad.

Be aggressive. Call leads. Rustle some leaves and ruffle some feathers. You won’t get very far–especially in the early stages of a company–without taking some initiative and calling leads.

Now, I am not suggesting that sales reps should call every marketing qualified lead. I’m not suggesting that at all. What I am suggesting is that many leads should be called. Depending on the size of your company this number could be in the 30% to 50% range. Certainly, if you are getting thousands of leads a month this isn’t possible. But if you are getting dozens or even hundreds, it is.

Our data shows us clearly that most companies are not nearly aggressive enough. If someone calls a business and asks about pricing, most sales reps simply provide pricing and hang up. What?!? That makes no sense. Someone called you to ask about pricing on a product you sell! Do not let them get off the phone until the deal is done!

Remember this: no one prices a product for fun. If they are pricing a product, they are looking to buy.

Conclusion

Again, not every marketing failure ever can be attributed to the 4 reasons listed above…but most can. Generally failures in marketing result from one of the 4 reasons listed above. Don’t believe me? I’ll make you a bet, if you can think of a failed marketing stategy or campaign that didn’t result from one of hte 4 reasons above, I’ll give you a free LogMyCalls account for a month!

Tags: Marketing

12 Tips To Kickstart Your Content Marketing Strategy

Quality and Quantity: Strive to publish great content as regularly as possible. Some of your articles won’t always hit the mark but when they do, they have the potential to go viral and your thought leadership will be shared widely across the social web.


Size Doesn’t Matter: There is no standard issue for the length of an article, duration of a video or number of pages in a white paper. Great content can run to many thousands of words or just a couple of sentences. Just make sure it’s relevant, interesting and timely – and you won’t go far wrong.

Words and Pictures: It might be a cliché – but it still rings true. A picture is worth 1,000 words and when available you should always use them. If that picture moves (i.e. video) – even better.

Get to the point: There is no need to dazzle your audience with endless streams of eloquent prose introducing your latest concept or best practice. Get to the point (starting with a solid headline) or you’ll risk losing your audience at the first hurdle.

Solve Problems: The best content helps to solve your customers’ problems and therefore validates your position as an expert. Don’t try and second guess your customers problems, ask them what makes their lives difficult and they will probably give you a list to work from.

Always Include a Call to Action: Remind your audience to do something after or during consuming your content. “Buy Now”, “Learn More” and “Register Here” are all good starting points. Remember this is marketing and it should lead to an action that can be tracked and reported against.

Make it Easy to Share: Make your content easy to share by including social media “share” buttons on every piece of content.

Re-Use, Re-Appropriate and Re-Cycle: Could a blog post be turned into a more detailed white paper? Could a webinar turn into a physical event or YouTube video? Great content has legs and screams to be used across a variety of media.

Don’t Forget Email: If your content has value (and it should do) then let your customers’ and prospects’ email addresses be the currency used to pay for it. Use email gateway pages to grant access to detailed content or include email registration forms or pop-ups on blog posts to drive subscriptions.Email Marketing services like iContact will provide you with all the tools you need to set this up.

Get Social and Distribute Widely: Great content is the foundation of any social media strategy. Distribute it, discuss it and review it via social media. Social engagement will lead to more ideas, new opportunities and wider recognition of you, your brand and your position as an expert in your own particular niche.

Online PR: Great thought leadership is highly newsworthy. Use an online news release tool like PRWeb to distribute your content to journalists, influential bloggers and across all the major search engines (this will also aid your SEO efforts significantly).

Just Do It: Your content needs to be well thought out and planned – but don’t let over planning delay your output. The best content marketers are agile and can turn ideas around quickly to take advantage of opportunities as and when they arise.

Tags: Social media, YouTube, Marketing, iContact, Search engine optimization, Internet marketing, Business, Marketing and Advertising

5 Big Data News You Should Know Today - 19 October 2012

Introducing from today, 5 Big Data news of the day.

1. IBM Takes a Big Data Approach to Security


Companies will spend an estimated $50 billion on computer security this year, but they are not feeling particularly secure these days.

Blame innovation, if you like. Every big digital advance opens the door to both opportunity and mischief. Smartphones, cloud computing and the data explosion promise a revolution in communications, cost-savings and knowledge discovery. But those three trends in technology also create security headaches.


Read More


2. Big Data Hype (and Reality)


The potential of "big data" has been receiving tremendous attention lately, and not just on HBR's site. With interest in the topic growing exponentially, it has been the focus of countless articles and perhaps too many meetings and conferences.

But to the extent that big data will have big impact, it might not be in the classic territory addressed by analytics. Most applications of data mining and analysis have been, at their hearts, attempts to get better at prediction. Decision-makers want to understand the patterns in the past and present in order to anticipate what is most likely to happen in the future. As big data offers unprecedented awareness of phenomena — particularly of consumers' actions and attitudes — will we see much improvement on the predictions of previous-generation methods? Let's look at the evidence so far, in three areas where better prediction of consumer behavior would clearly be valuable.

Read More


3. Twitter: The human face of big data

Every day, Twitter users send 400 million Tweets expressing a vast array of ideas and opinions. Collectively, and studied in aggregate, public Tweets are not only measurable. They can reveal any number of clues and trends about who we are: our cultures, our mindsets, who we favor or disfavor, and much more.

For instance, analyzing billions of Tweets helped two researchers unlock new insightsabout public health issues and the way disease is spread.

Read More


4. BloomReach nets $25M to turn big data into marketing gold

BloomReach raked in $25 million in new venture funding in a C Series round led by New Enterprise Associates, bringing total venture funding to a healthy $41 million. The be-all-and-end-all for BloomReach, which emerged from stealth in February, is to help online retailers make the stuff they sell more easily found by would-be buyers so they’ll actually sell more of it.

As BloomReach CEO Raj De Datta told my colleague Derrick Harris early this year, companies don’t know how to show off their product catalogs in a way that best aligns with how customers search. Less than a quarter of web pages get any traffic from natural or paid search in a given month – a problem that will only get worse as the amount of online data grows. Their products are needles in an ever-expanding haystack. But if they know how people are searching for things and learn how to display their content better to suit that behavior, they can boost discoverability and thus sales.

“Understanding relevance of content to the way people express themselves turns out to be a difficult problem,” De Datta told Harris.

Read More


5. Big Data to drive $28bn of IT spending: Gartner

The figure is expected to increase to $34bn by 2013.

The rise in businesses dealing with more information will see Big Bata contribute $28bn to global IT spending in 2012, according to a new report from Gartner.Gartner revealed that the figure is expected to increase to $34bn by 2013, with 10% of new spending each year swayed by investment in big data, when compared to storage software, database management system, data integration/quality, business intelligence or supply chain management (SCM).
Currently, most Big Data spending is used on deploying traditional solutions to the Big Data demands, including machine data, social data, widely varied data and unpredictable velocity.
The research firm also revealed that the demands for new Big Data functionality in 2012 will directly drive only about $4.3bn of sales of software.

Read More

Tags: #Big Data News

5 Ways to Make Web Analytics Data More Insightful

Fortune 500 companies can expect to push more than a gigabyte a day in raw web analytics data, which can be easily tripled for media companies. Big data is anything anyone ever talks about anymore, so the C-suite has never been more interested in integrated analytics, shining a spotlight on the web analyst team to deliver more than just pretty charts and high-level talking points.

Pulling the information from web analytics software should be less than 10 percent of the work, with an overwhelming 90 percent of time dedicated to deriving insights your organization can use to drive change.

So how to you go from pulling numbers to authoring insights?

1. Compare Trends, Not Just Differences

Web analytics software makes it extremely easy to compare equal periods of adjacent data, such as month-over-month or year-over-year, but other logical comparisons such as average weekday, current day versus the same day last week and other options are much more difficult to configure.

Unfortunately, the best way to find meaning in trends is by exporting data into Excel and crunching these numbers manually or by using pivot tables. You can then add layers of additional analysis such as calculating the long term mean, variance, and standard deviation.

2. Analyze the Significance of Your Data Before Drawing Conclusions

Nothing is worse than a web analyst that “cries wolf” over every little hiccup in a conversion rate. I once had a colleague that was very worried about a campaign’s performance, which dropped off sharply 8 weeks after launch, only later to learn that it was a back-to-school campaign and we were approaching Thanksgiving.

As discussed in the previous tip, calculating standard deviation is an easy way to determine whether the change you see in absolute numbers is statistically significant, if your data falls outside of two standard deviations of the mean.

3. Dig Deeper With Segmentation

Deciding on a driving force for statistically significant change is where you’re likely to spend 90 percent of your time in formulating insights.

Sometimes the driving force behind observed changes can be painfully obvious, such as broken functionality on a website, but other times a change can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. By segmenting your analytics data, you can quickly find commonly-shared behavioural traits that are influencing the changes in trends observed.

4. Correlate Reported Trends With Business Impact

This is the part of the report that should answer: why do I care? As a simple rule of thumb, try to attribute fair assumptions in revenue generation, cost savings, or visitor satisfaction back to the trends you observe.

For instance, did the landing page for a seasonal campaign perform significantly better last year? If so, how quickly could a change be made and what is the overall effect the change would make on bottom-line sales dollars?

5. Make Insights Actionable

The easiest way to make insights actionable is to derive ideas for a complementary optimization program. While there are many places to start optimizing, the goal for your web analytics reports is to include insights that can actually be completed within a short amount of time and have a significant impact.

It neither make sense to test modifications to pages with less than 1 percent of your overall site’s traffic, nor does it make any sense to recommend changes to pages beyond your organization’s control.

How do you make your web analytics reporting more insightful? Share your comments and ideas below!

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10 Reasons SEO Is Harder for Small Businesses

“Why is SEO harder for small businesses?” This question has popped up a couple of times in our organic keyword referrers. We’ve been saying for months that SEO is getting harder, and that it’s especially difficult for SMBs to excel at. But why? Why is SEO easier for the big dogs? Make no mistake, it is – even if it’s getting harder for them too.

Here are 10 reasons why smaller businesses struggle to succeed at SEO.

1. You have less money.

This is the #1 reason SEO – and everything else! – is harder for small businesses. It’s an old saw but it’s true: You have to spend money to make money. The reason companies spend money on marketing and advertising is because they deliver ROI, but sometimes there’s a tipping point. For example we’ve seen small businesses that didn’t see ROI from PPC until they raised their daily spend, counter-intuitively. SEO is the same way. If you can devote more money to your search engine optimization efforts, you’ll see better returns. Bigger companies have bigger budgets they can allocate towards hiring more employees, bringing in top-notch consultants, investing in “big content” and great web design, and so on.

2. You have less time.

OK, I lied: This is tied for #1. Time is money, and if you have less money you also have less time. Fewer heads on the marketing team means that everyone is juggling multiple tasks and nobody can focus 100% of their time on SEO. Some businesses are so small they have just one or two people doing EVERYTHING, making SEO exponentially harder. Real SEO takes a lot of time. Creating worthwhile content, optimizing your web pages, promoting your assets and securing links, running A/B tests – none of this is easy. Small businesses end up doing a rush job or neglecting it altogether, resulting in underoptimized sites with poor rankings.

3. Something else always comes first.

When you’re short on resources, SEO-related tasks always seem to get pushed to the bottom of the list. Blogging and other forms of content creation are a prime example – everyone’s got the best of intentions, promises are made (“I’ll get you that blog post by the end of the week!”) but nothing ever really gets written and published. The fact is, if you wait to do SEO until everything else is done, you’ll never do any SEO. That’s why big companies hire a dedicated SEO – no excuses.

4. It’s harder to keep up with changes.

Again, this is essentially a resource problem. An SEO specialist who lives and breathes search has time (and incentive) to follow industry publications and keep up with the rapidly changing search landscape. They’ll know if Google has released a big algorithm change or other significant update that could affect your rankings and strategy. They’ll hear about new techniques and be better able to judge what’s worth trying and what isn’t. SMB marketers are often too busy trying to keep up with their own industry vertical to spend any time following the twists and turns of SEO. Here at WordStream, we have an advantage because search marketing is what we do – we have to keep up with search. But what if you sell shoes or medical equipment? Your morning reading is going to look very different.

5. Google favors brands.

In SEO we love to whine that Google favors brands, but the truth is, everyonefavors brands. All other things being equal, Google ranks big brands higher in the search results because they have user behavior data indicating that people click more often on recognizable brand websites. So if you want to compete on a keyword that bigger brands are also going after, you’ll have to work that much harder to prove your content is relevant and worth the user’s time. For a lot of branded keywords, you’ll never be able to beat the bigger companies.

6. Bigger businesses have been at it longer.

Big businesses weren’t born that way – they started small and grew. So big companies have generally been around longer. If you’ve been operating as a small business, doing well but staying small, for many years, that’s great – you’ll have an advantage. But lots of small businesses haven’t been around that long, and it’s tougher for them to rank because their younger websites haven’t accrued authority and a great link profile yet. This is why it’s harder for new websites to rank on competitive keywords. Aside from the fact that Google likes older domains, big brands have simply been doing SEO longer, so they’ve more things and they know what works and what doesn’t. They can repeat past successes and repurpose their content assets, rather than starting from scratch all the time.

7. Your website is smaller.

If you’re a small business, chances are your site isn’t just newer, it’s smaller too. You have less content and fewer pages overall, which amounts to fewer keywords you can possibly target and fewer opportunities to rank. Really big websites get more traffic in part because the sea of search queries they have the potential to rank for is so much bigger. And big brands have bigger websites because (you guessed it) they have more resources to funnel toward creating content, and because they offer more products and services. Think of Amazon and all the individual pages they have for each and every product they offer!

8. You have fewer tools and less powerful software.

Your itsy-bitsy marketing budget rears its ugly head again. Enterprises can afford to invest in great software. The in-house SEO at a big company has tools at his disposal that automate away some of the time-consuming tasks involved with search marketing. They can afford to buy up for better analytics, better keyword research, better reporting tools, better conversion optimization tools, etc., etc. Small companies are often stuck with free, which makes it harder to gain a competitive advantage. More manual work also takes more time.

9. You have less clout to leverage for link building and media coverage.

Big sites and brands with great reputations tend to get links without even trying. It also helps to have some weight behind your name when you actively reach out for links. If you’re trying to get media coverage in a big publication, it helps enormously if they’ve already heard of you. Barring that, it’s great to be able to say that your business has been mentioned in other notable venues – it’s like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. But smaller businesses are less likely to have brand recognition on their side.

10. You don’t have a relationship with Google.

Bigger companies tend to have a personal relationship with Google. They may have a dedicated rep. If something goes south (“Holy crap, our rankings fell off a cliff overnight!!”) they can call their contact at Google for help. Small businesses will have a lot more trouble figuring out what to do. It’s a dirty little not-so-secret secret, perhaps – like the fact that it’s much easier to get into an Ivy League school if your family name is on one of the buildings – but big brands spend a lot of money on Google advertising (like $50 million a year). And that means they’ve got connections inside, and Google is invested in keeping them happy.

Is SEO Still Worth the Trouble? In a Word, Yes

Now listen: We’re not saying you should give up on SEO. In fact, you have to do at least the bare minimum SEO if you want to have a reasonably viable presence online. Basically, if you have a website, you want to accomplish three things:
Help potential customers find your site via search.
Make sure your site is easy to navigate once they’ve found it.
Make sure it’s obvious what they should do next, whether that’s calling in or adding something to a shopping cart – and convince them to do it.

These tasks, especially the second two, involve the principles of web design, usability, and conversion rate optimization as much as they do SEO. But to accomplish #1, you’re going to have to think about search engine optimization. Of course, you should have other sources of traffic for your site – PPC/remarketing, social media, email marketing, word of mouth – but if you neglect SEO, you’re leaving a great potential source of brand-new leads untapped.

The trick for small businesses is figuring out what you can accomplish given your limited resources. Also, remember that there may be ways that being small actually helps you! For example, small business are often more agile, and more willing to experiment. So stick with it, cover your basics first, make sure your managers know SEO is important, and investigate new opportunities as you can find the time.

Do you work at a small business? How do you deal with the challenges of SEO?

4 Types of Employees to Hire as an Entrepreneur

As quickly as economically possible, expand your staff. You can’t do it all by yourself. Make sure you hire the right number of people; too few is just as bad as too many. For example, if one employee is responsible for a big portion of your success, realize that if that person leaves, your company could be in jeopardy. You might consider breaking the critical parts of that single position into two separate positions, to minimize the risks of relying solely on one person. But whatever you do, don’t take on that extra responsibility yourself so that you’re doing the work. You’ll never expand your business that way.

Here are 4 Choices of Who to Hire:

Hire Someone who Complements You

Don’t hire someone who is exactly like you. You need to hire people who provide different levels of expertise than you do. And yet when hiring anyone, regardless of their expertise, you’ll find that it’s still important to make sure that they fit within the culture of your company. If they don’t, you won’t be happy, they won’t be happy and production will suffer.

Hire a Product Development Expert

Your employees must be committed to growing the revenue of your company. The first step to revenue growth is making sure you have a high quality product or hiring someone who has the expertise to improve your product. If your product isn’t of high quality, you’ll lose clients quickly and gain a poor reputation in the community and market place. Word spreads quickly!

Hire a Rainmaker

Thirdly, hire someone to help you sell. Especially if you don’t like to sell, this person will be extremely critical to getting your company off the ground quickly. In fact, I highly recommend that you hire someone who can service and sell — with an emphasis on sales. Many times it’s hard to find one person with both of these skills, but I’m telling you from experience, you don’t want someone who services and refuses to sell. In my opinion, even when you start to build out your firm and you have more service people, you’ll still want your service people to sell — this criterion is essential for the continued growth of your company. Your service people must also understand how to upsell products as much as possible.

Keep in mind that any employee you hire, especially in the beginning, must be able to bring in revenue to the company. Every employee needs to understand that the success of the company depends on earning more clients. Even the person in charge of product development is selling. Without that individual making your product better, you have nothing to sell.

Hire Administrative Help

The fourth person you should hire is an administrative person who can perform a multitude of tasks. He or she becomes your support. If this hire also happens to bring you someone with a talent or even a liking for sales, that would be great as well! You might find someone just starting out or just getting back into the workforce who would like to be in sales but doesn’t have the sales skills yet, and that’s fine. You or your salesperson can teach them the skills that will help grow your company.

5 Must-Know Copyright Facts for Freelance Writers

If you are a freelance writer/blogger, your copyright is quite literally your livelihood. After all, if you lose the ability to sell and trade on your work, you lose your revenue stream.

However, many freelance writers are woefully unaware of the copyright issues that surround their craft, either finding the issues too confusing or relying instead on misinformation and bad advice.

If you make your living selling your work, no matter what the content is, you owe it to yourself and your future to understand the laws that surround your craft and that is a big part of what Plagiarism Today is about.

However, for freelance writers, here are a few specific tips and points to be aware of in copyright law. Needless to say, this isn’t a thorough overview of all the issues you need to be aware of, but rather, just a few of the finer points that are often misunderstood.

1. Work for Hire May Not Apply

Work for hire law (PDF) is a sticky issue but, for most freelance writers, it doesn’t apply. If you are not an actual employee of the company that you’re writing for, which a freelancer generally wouldn’t be, then for a work to be considered a work for hire it has to meet two conditions:


(1) it comes within one of the nine categories of works listed in part 2 of the definition and (2) there is a written agreement between the parties specifying that the work is a work made for hire.

The nine categories referenced in that paragraph are as follow:

(1) a contribution to a collective work, (2) a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, (3) a translation, (4) a supplementary work, (5) a compilation, (6) an instructional text, (7) a test, (8) answer material for a test, (9) an atlas;

Clearly, a freelance writing project does not fit neatly into any of those nine categories though it may be considered a contribution to a compilation sometimes.

What this means is that, in many cases, though paid for their work, a freelance author has the copyright in it and can do with it what they please. This includes reselling the work to others, stopping infringement and so forth.

The question then becomes can an author demand removal of a work that has been paid for? The answer is less clear. When you sell a work or write it for a site, there is at least an implied license to allow the customer to use it (what else did they pay for?) but how long the terms last and how other changes in the situation affect it remain unclear.

This is why it is best to get a contract with every project though, bear in mind, buyers can protect themselves with contracts to, mandating exclusivity for example.

2. No Registration, No Lawsuit

Though you have copyright protection in a work the moment it is fixed into a tangible medium of expression, to enforce those rights you need to have a registration on file with the U.S. Copyright Office and, ideally, you need to have done so either within three months of publication or before the infringement took place.

Without a registration, there is no means of filing a lawsuit in the U.S., unless you are a foreign copyright holder, and without a timely registration there is no way to collect statutory damages or attorney’s fees, which makes a suit impractical in most cases (this is true for both U.S. citizens and foreign copyright holders).

If you’re serious about enforcing your legal rights, you need to regularly register your work and maintain those registrations. Without them, though you can file takedown notices and take other action, you can not take the case before a court.

3. Attribution Not Always Required

Though some freelancers ghostwrite content by choice, and are paid well for it hopefully, others do not and are upset when they don’t receive attribution for their work.

Unfortunately, in the U.S., there is no protection for moral rights, at least not for writers and non-visual artists. as such, Attribution is usually not a requirement for such content use, unless it is stipulated in the contract.

This is an area where the U.S. deviates sharply from other countries, which usually have a very robust protection for moral rights and mandate that attribution be included, even when the copyright in the work has been sold.

However, even in countries with moral rights, authors can often times sign away their right to enforce them, which effectively negates them and such clauses are common.

4. Copyright Transfer Requires a Signed Contract

This is a related issue to the work for hire one mentioned above, but it is important to note that the law very explicitly states that, without a written and signed contract (at least one signed by the original rights holder), a transfer of copyright can not take place.

According to the law, copyright is very much like any other piece of property you have in that you can sell it, lease it, rent it or give it away. However, you can not transfer a copyright without a signed agreement, meaning that oral agreements and “handshake deals” are not valid.

In short, if you have not signed over the copyright to your work, you haven’t given up your copyright.

That being said, in many cases, as with the terms of service on various sites, you may grant licenses of use that can, in some cases, behave much like a transfer of copyright. It is a situation similar to being the owner of a car but not being able to drive or otherwise use it as those rights are assigned to someone else.

5. The Messy World of Joint Authorship

Under copyright law, the copyright of a work almost always transfers directly to the creator of it. But what happens if more than one person collaborate on a work? Things often get messy.

Joint authorship is a very confusing and difficult area of copyright law but the fundamentals are pretty easy.

First, all authors have an equal share of the work, regardless of the size of their contribution, and all can independently, without the agreement of the other parties, enter into non-exclusive license arrangements (though revenue earned has to be shared equally). However, exclusive licenses require the input of all authors.

Second, each author can do what they want with their portion of the copyright, including selling it, leasing it, etc. The exact same with any other copyright they hold. Finally, the authors are all given an undivided share, meaning that they own part of other’s contributions as well as their own.

However, a work only qualifies as a joint authorship when the authors work together “with the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole.” In short, if the contributions can be easily separated, such as separate chapters in a book, joint authorship doesn’t apply.

Enter into joint authorships at your own risk and, if you do, always have a clear contract and clear understanding of what the rules are before going in. Joint authorships have destroyed many good friendships and partnerships over the years.

Bottom Line

If you don’t understand what your rights are in your works, you can not enforce them or exploit them and, if you’re a freelancer, that can have a very negative impact on your business.

The same as construction companies need to know building codes and delivery companies traffic laws, it is important for freelance writers to understand copyright law.

Once again, this is not meant to be a thorough overview of copyright law for freelancers, but rather, an overview of some of the most commonly misunderstood points of the law that relates to them. Any freelance writer would do well to visit the U.S. Copyright Office site and learn more about the law if they don’t know it well already.

A few hours of education can save you tons of money and tons of headaches down the road.

It is a worthwhile investment for every freelance writer.