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Using Quotes in Your Blog Legally and Ethically In today’s lesson, I want to talk about using quotes on your blog. I’m regularly asked – particularly by new bloggers – what the etiquette and legalities are around using content that others have written in your own content – or the practice of quoting others. It’s a good question because quoting others and building upon their ideas with your blog can be one way to improve the quality of your content, serve your readers and build relationships with others (the ones that you quote). Having said that – using the content with others in inappropriate ways is something I see semi-regularly and it can really hurt (if not destroy) your reputation if you don’t do it right. There’s no need to worry though – it’s not hard to get right and in this podcast I’m going to share why quotes are beneficial, why you need to do it right, some tips on how to do it and lastly I want to share some ways to use quotes on your blog to create different types of content. Listen to this podcast in the player above or here on iTunes. Further Resources on How to Use Quotes in Your Blog Content Legally and Ethically 8 Tips for Using Quotes and Dialogue in Your Blog Posts The Why, How and When of Using Quotations on Your Blog How to Cite Sources & Not Steal People’s Content on the Internet When Do You Need to Secure Permissions? ProBlogger Facebook Challenge Group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there, and welcome to Episode 173 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse, and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger.com – a blog, podcast, event, job board, series of eBooks, and a real book, too – all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your blog to create amazing content, to build community and engagement with your readers, and hopefully to make some money from your blog as well. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at ProBlogger.com. In today’s lesson, the last of 2016, I wanna talk about using quotes on your blog. I’m regularly asked, particularly by new bloggers, “What’s the etiquette and legalities around using content that other people have written on their blogs or in their books or in other forms? How do you use that in your own content?” or I guess, questions about the practice of quoting other people. It’s a great question because quoting other people and building upon their ideas with your blog’s content can be one way to really improve the content on your blog. It’s a great way to serve your readers (and we’ll talk a little bit more about why that’s the case) and to build relationships with others, the people that you quote. There’s a lot of benefits of having quotes in your content, but having said all that, using content from others in inappropriate ways is something that I do see people doing semi-regularly. It can really hurt, if not destroy your reputation as a blogger, if you don’t do it the right way. That might sound a little bit harsh, but I have seen people’s profiles and credibility really ripped to shreds because they haven’t done it right. That might sound harsh. I just want to say right up front, there’s no need to worry. It’s not hard to do right. This podcast is all about doing it the right way. In this podcast, I wanna talk a little bit about why you should use quotes, how to do it right, some tips on practically how to do it, and I wanna share some ways that you can use quotes and begin to practice using quotes in your content to create different types of content. You can find today’s shownotes, where I will link to some further reading on this topic that we’ve published on ProBlogger and some reading that I found in researching today’s podcast at ProBlogger.com/podcast/173. I do just wanna take a quick moment to say that this is the last episode of 2016. Christmas was yesterday here in Australia. It’s summer. It’s hot. The air conditioner is on. You might be able to hear it in the background. The New Year is just a few days away. I just wanted to pause for a moment to wish you all very well for the end of the year. If you’re celebrating Christmas or another holiday, I hope you’re having a happy holiday period. I just wanted you to know that I am incredibly grateful for you listening to the ProBlogger podcast in 2016. It has been an amazing year, and I’ve had so much fun putting this show together for you. I look forward to continuing to do it in the new year. It’s summer holidays here in Australia, so over the next few weeks, I may not quite keep up with my weekly schedule. I’m gonna do my best, but family comes first this time of year for us. It is hard to find a quiet patch over the school holidays to record, but I just wanted to let you know that I will get back to a regular posting schedule towards the end of the January. I look forward to sharing with you some news of some changes that are happening to ProBlogger late in January, early in Feb. Thanks for listening, and if you are listening to this from 2017, the future, Happy New Year to you. Okay, let’s get on with today’s show. Very quick disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and what follows is not legal advice. If in doubt, seek the advice of a lawyer. Today we’re talking about quotes, and I wanted to start off by talking about why quotes are actually something that I think blogs should use on their blogs in some way and in different times. Firstly – and I saw this right from the beginning of my blogging – quotes actually were a big part of blogging back in 2002, when I started. In fact, I would say probably 10, 15, 20% of my blog posts usually started with me bouncing off the idea that someone else had started on their blog, so it was very common for bloggers to be linking to one another and quoting one another in the early days. A lot of that quoting and a lot of that linking now seems to happen on social media, but I do think it’s something that we could rediscover as bloggers. Quoting someone else is a good way to add a little bit of credibility to your articles and to make them more interesting and informative to your readers as well – to be able to add to an article that you’ve written something like, “I’m not the only one who thinks this; so does this person, who said, …” and then to use their quote. That can add a little bit of credibility to your ideas. It makes your arguments stronger. It can also lift the quality of your posts, to include insights and thoughts of other people. In doing so, I think it really serves your readers to be able to add a bit more depth to your articles. You also will learn a lot by seeking the ideas of others. In putting this particular podcast together, I’ve read three or four articles, all of which are linked to in today’s shownotes. I’m using the ideas of other people, and I’ll acknowledge those in the shownotes as well. You’re gonna learn by seeking out the ideas of others and using quotes. The other thing I’ll say about quotes as a benefit of using them, is that sometimes you’ll get noticed by the people you quote. I quoted Bob Burg a few months ago. He’s a guy who came up with the quote, “People do like to do business with those that they know, like, and trust.” I used that quote in an article, and Bob Burg tweeted me the other day saying, “Thanks for quoting me” and began a conversation. People will notice you if they’re still alive and they’re active in the social space. They will notice you when you quote, and this can be the beginning of win-win relationships. Who knows what might come out of those? There are some really good reasons for using quotes on your blog. Now why do you need to do it right? Firstly, I would say there’s ethical reasons for it and legal requirements in some cases to give credit to those whose words and ideas you are using. If you wanna be seen as a good bloke or a good person in the blogosphere, it’s an ethical thing that you wanna do, but there’s also legal reasons to do it. You certainly don’t want to be caught plagiarizing by taking the words and ideas of other people and presenting them as your own. If I think about the way that I see people misusing the words of others, sometimes it’s done with intent to hide the fact that they’re not your own words, and other times, people do it without really knowing what they’re doing. You wanna really be careful. It’s an ethical thing. It’s a legal thing. It’s just the right thing to do. In my opinion, it shows your readers that you’re well-read and that you’re an ethical person as well – and to actually show your readers that you’ve gone to the effort to find out what other people think on this idea and then to quote them – I think shows your readers that you’re going above and beyond. You’re not just sharing your thoughts; you’re going to the effort of finding other people’s thoughts as well. It’s going to get you in trouble in the long run, both in terms of your credibility but also legally if you don’t do it right, so please learn the basics of how to do it and do it right. How do you do it right? Again, I’m not a lawyer here, and I’m gonna link to some more legal advice in today’s shownotes, but here’s what I do when I’m quoting someone. Firstly, I always put quotation marks around the words of someone else’s so that it’s explicitly clear that it’s not my words. I am quoting someone else, and to actually put those quotation marks around the words of someone else’s is just good form. It shows in your content the words that someone else said. Number two – I always name the author. Give the person the credit. If the author is Mike Stelzner, quote Mike Stelzner. If the author was someone long gone, then name that particular person, Shakespeare. It doesn’t really matter. Name the person. Number three – provide a link back wherever possible, either to the exact content that you took the words from. If you took the words from a blog post, link back to that blog post. If you took the words from a podcast, link back, if you can find it, to that podcast. If you took the words from a video on YouTube, link back to that piece of content on YouTube. If you are unable to find the exact piece of content or if it was in a speech, for example, which there’s no recorded piece of content, find some other meaningful page of that person – if you can, their homepage or a social media profile – and link back to that. I think it’s a really good form to link back. There’s a few reasons to why I suggest this and why I think it’s really important to go to the piece of content that you are taking the words from. I think it actually serves your readers to be able to link to that. It shows your readers where you took the words, and it allows your readers to go and have a look at the extended piece of content around those words. If you are taking a few words from an article that you’ve written in a blog post, it gives your readers the ability to go and have a look at the context of those words and see what else is said in that particular article. I think that serves your readers. It also serves the person whose words you are quoting. It hopefully drives some traffic and some more interest in them – helps them to grow their profile and their credibility, which helps to grow that relationship between you and them as well. If you can’t find the specific piece of content, a link to their Twitter account or to their homepage, if they have them, or some other meaningful place for that person. If the person has no online presence at all, I guess you could link to their Wikipedia page or something like that as well. But if it’s someone like Shakespeare, then everyone generally knows who that is and just using their name is good. The other question I get asked a lot is, “How much content can you take from someone else?” This is one where I really – am not a lawyer, but generally for me, I would only ever really take one to three sentences, a paragraph if you like, from someone else’s article. If I wanna use more, I would always try and seek permission. There have been times where I’ve taken longer chunks of content, but I’ve gone to the blogger or I’ve gone to the podcaster, and I’ve actually asked permission to do that. I used an excerpt from Tim Ferriss’s podcast on this particular podcast a few months ago, and I sought the permission of Tim because I realized that what I wanted to share was more than just a few sentences. It was a chunk, and he graciously allowed me to do that. The same has happened for me in blog posts as well. The advice that I’ve read today on this is that the amount that you can use generally depends upon the proportion of the text that you are taking from the overall piece of content that that person has created. For example, I read one piece of advice today that said taking 250 words is okay, if it’s from a book, but if you’re taking a quote from an article that might be 1000 words long, you might wanna only choose 50 or 70 words from that article. Really it depends upon the proportion of the overall piece of content that that person has created. I’m gonna leave some further reading on that, particularly from a woman by the name of Jane Friedman in today’s shownotes. Again, you can find the shownotes at ProBlogger.com/podcast/173. I generally err on the side of quoting less and telling my readers to go and read the rest of the article. I much prefer to say two sentences, and “if you want to read more, this person has more great advice. Go and find out the rest of what they have to say on the topic in the article that they’ve written.” The other thing I’d say about the how-tos of quoting is that sometimes you need to modify the quote. That is either to give the quote a bit of context – you might wanna add a few words to it so that your readers actually understand the context of what’s being said, or you may think it’s best to take a few words out to shorten the quote perhaps or just to find the meaty bits of it. The way that you modify that – I think it’s really important to be very clear about what you have modified. If I’m adding a word or two to a quote, just to explain the context, I would always put that in brackets, so I usually use square brackets. If I am taking words out, I would always add in three dots, the ellipses to show that you have removed something from that particular quote. You might choose a sentence at the start of a paragraph and then one towards the end and put them together and then put the dots between that. Always be really clear about how you’re modifying that particular quote. A few other pieces of advice. One is I would encourage you always to add your own thoughts to a quote. I do see bloggers from time to time just taking a quote and putting that up as a blog post. Now that’s totally fine to do. It’s, as far as I can see, a legal thing to do. It’s even ethical as long as you’re linking back to that person, but I think it would serve your readers better if you would just talk a little bit about why you think that quote is good – so a paragraph of introduction as to why you’ve chosen this quote, a paragraph or two at the end about what you would add to it, how you would qualify what they say, telling a story that illustrates the point of the quote, adding something extra into the quote I think is a really important thing to do. Two other things that I wanna say about giving credit online, and this is where you’re not just quoting people, but you’re actually giving people credit for different things. Firstly, I think it’s really important if you are not quoting the exact words of someone else but you’re referencing an idea that they have shared, I think it’s really good form and probably a legal thing as well to give them credit for inspiring what you’re writing. To give you an example of this – back in 2008, I came across a video presentation from a guy called Chris Brogan at ChrisBrogan.com. Chris, many of you will know – he was doing a lot of writing and thinking back then on blogging, social m…
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