I know you got sick and tired of hearing the same thing: “content is king”, but let me tell you ONCE again, you have NO idea how true this is. A good site is important for us because of the GOOD UNIQUE content, because it’s useful and we need all those informational articles in order to be able to understand a topic and gain as much knowledge as possible.

A good content is now one of the most sought for commodities on the web. People pay good money for unique articles, for re-writing (when they can’t hire professionals or are just too cheap to pay for something good, but they still want to fool the search engines into thinking the content is original), translations and many other options.

Most of the bloggers and article writers who create unique articles are already in a huge advantage: they create something original that draws people in and can also bring in revenue from advertising or any other money making plans. And still, I am shocked to see how many such good bloggers are too lax when it comes to protecting their own content.

Even if a unique article is just 5 minutes of work to you, its value is HUGE. Because it’s UNIQUE.

I started creating articles 6 years ago with a Karate site for the Romanian people who were into martial arts. In just weeks I saw my work being copied by others. I got mad and demanded for the duplicated plagiarism to be deleted. It was. Sure, I got some response like “yeah, you’re so mean, why can’t I use the article too?”, but I knew I was right. I am mean indeed, but that unique article that’s too good to be stolen, is also good to bring ME traffic and revenue in time and establish me and my site as an authority.

In some months I started a webmaster project (forums with unique articles) and got even more interested in creating content and also protecting it as much as I could. There are tens of articles I wrote and tried to make them interesting and useful. Sure, I am not a professional writer, but this didn’t stop my visitors from learning something from me and be able to improve their web design skills.

From time to time I still have people who steal content from me or try to scrape my blog articles. My content, even if copied partially, can bring some traffic to them and revenue. They do try to steal our content to make their sites content rich and earn money from our work. I still have to see such content thieves who have NO ads at all on their site (since most try to fool us into thinking they are just good samaritans and wanted their visitors to get more knowledge blah-blah-blah). Sure, with Adsense all over the site and tons of affiliate links. All with my own articles. Cute!

So, maybe it’s time for most of us, (good or bad) content writers, to realize the IMPORTANCE of our content. For our site that would have more visitors, a good image and why not a good revenue and for ourselves too since all our articles do have VALUE. In this case the value is for our site only. We don’t have to pay tens of dollars for an original article, we have it created in few minutes by our talented minds. The others, who can’t create articles are invited to PAY for a unique article and we’d surely provide them with the best article we can create.

But our work is ours and will be used ONLY in our projects. As Google gets more drastic with duplicate content and as the content market grows each day, a good unique article is like a jewel that needs to be protected. Even if some think I am mean, I don’t allow re-publishing. UNDER NO CONDITIONS. I don’t care what site you use, I don’t care how much of my article you are using. You can’t do this.

What can a visitor do if he/she really likes one of my articles? The same I do: I just link to it and write a nice short personal presentation recommending it to my visitors. I do promote that good article and still don’t steal the content another author created.

Maybe it’s a good idea to be “mean” and try protect that king. We don’t want other sites (stealing our content) to get better traffic than we do, we don’t want others to earn money from our work. If it takes you and me 5-10 minutes for an article, this doesn’t mean it’s worthless. It means we might type fast and just have the ideas flow. The fact we don’t spend 5 hours into making an article, doesn’t mean the article has no value. And this value, even if sometimes we fail to understand this, is big enough to attract others to use it for their own profit.

What do you think about this? How important is your own content to you?