If you are a blogger or content creator, your website is your major source of money. It’s your medium of expression, online. For a lot of people, it’s both. We have all heard the proverb ‘better safe than sorry’; it’s a harrowing experience to find that what you’ve worked so hard to bring to life is being copied by nefarious people. This sort of uncontrolled plagiarism strips your credit and potential sales as well. To safeguard yourself from such a situation, you can consider various components of your website that should be protected using various methods.
#1 Logo
You should try your best to get your logo protected by a trademark. This is just common sense, but in my experience, I have seen too many cases of logo-theft that this can’t go unmentioned. This is a possibility when you are hiring a cheap freelancer or design firm to design your logo.
Your logo becomes the face of your brand and becomes something that your customer associates with you everytime they see that. Cheap options like fiverr are filled with unethical designers who clone other designs or stock graphics that doesn’t have any brand value.
#2 Source Code
Any software you use for your website, from the basic HTML framework, to javascript to your database structure and other technical tools and programs, should be protected by a reliable source code escrow. When you hire a development agency to build a website for you, make sure that you own every last bit of the code you paid for, that makes up your website and its features.
If you are not making websites and features that are custom built for you, but are choosing third party vendors to fit your needs, then you should always insist on a software escrow clause in your licensing agreement. This will make sure that your website stays afloat even under an unfortunate situation of your vendor going bankrupt.
#3 Content
It doesn’t matter if it’s a landing page, a blog post, or a valuable ebook, the internet is filled with plagiarists who would steal your work as soon as they can and this can be a hard pill to swallow. The good news is that, when you are publishing a blog post, it’s instantly copyright-protected by default if you are displaying a standard copyright notice in the footer of your blog. This can help you in a lot of ways, when you find someone else using your work without permission.
For larger body of works that are relatively static, such as an ebook or white paper, it’s best to pay $35 to copyright it properly. Copyrighting your whole blog is a tricky thing to do, as it is being updated constantly and unless you are willing to spend a lot of time and money on it, copywriting each and every post you write would end up being a cumbersome task and financially expensive process as well. As an alternative, submit copyright applications to the concerned regulatory body once or twice a year, to include all the work that was published in that period of time.
You can find various tools that will help you to find and remove plagiarized content online. You can also use file complaints in Google when you find plagiarized content to take them down.
Conclusion
I hope this article was useful for you to learn more about why it is important to protect your website and the various ways and means by which you will be able to achieve the same. If you have any doubts with regards to this, let us know through the comments and we will be glad to help you out. If you have any suggestions regarding how we can improve the article, let us know them through the comments as well for us to improve.
Do you have any other reservations against using a software escrow? Have you tried any other strategies and tools to make sure that a critical software for operation is not affected at any cost? What is your opinion on the state of the industry when it comes to SaaS businesses? Do you think it’s stable enough for small companies to flourish? Let us know through the comments.
