Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2014. The traffic figures are from June 2014, including 48% of visits from mobiles and tablets and LinkedIn as the second social network by traffic. Google+ was shut down for consumers in 2019.
Some time ago I was given a piece of advice about success: “Whatever you do, make sure you do it in such a way that, once you succeed, you can explain how you did it without being ashamed”. It is a principle I have followed since I started this blog and in every area of my professional life.
Today this blog is sometimes widely mentioned, but it is also a blog whose articles are constantly prostituted by influential media that cannot be bothered to cite the source and/or link to the article. Last year we had a serious problem with Google, which was treating our original articles as copies and giving the top search rankings to well-established sites that had started treating our content as an all-you-can-eat buffet, and that was seriously hurting us. In fact, some of the damage is still there today.
It is regrettable that one of the outlets I am referring to is Yahoo News itself, where certain contributors have published our articles without citing or linking to them. Now try telling Google that the copied content belongs to Yahoo. And I know that in this case it is not Yahoo’s fault, as I suppose it cannot control every writer or contributor.
It may sound like an exaggeration, but some of our articles have more copies than Facebook “likes”. What ends up crushing you is seeing your article shared on the outlet that copied it, getting thousands of likes and up to 500 shares, while on our own Facebook page the same article goes almost unnoticed. It feels like being kicked in the shin right after being kicked in the backside 100 times.
We hired someone to look into the problem and give us a solution, and we finally found that more than 200 blogs were reproducing our articles word for word, comma for comma (even with my own stylistic slips). Many of them did not cite or link, a few cited us, and fewer still cited and linked. We also had to contact 12 major outlets to ask them what was going on, since we understood that this was not ignorance of professional ethics but deliberate malpractice.
Some of you will already know which outlets these are, so I am not even going to name them. Instead, today and from now on every month, we are going to focus on the media and blogs that act in good faith, ethically and professionally, and to whom all we can do is say a heartfelt thank you for recognising the work others do.
One piece of advice to round off the introduction:
When you cite and link, you are recognising and admiring someone’s work, but when you neither cite nor link, it is a bit like theft, because you are simply taking advantage of another person’s work.
The fact that some of the American authors we have linked to in our posts have written to thank us for mentioning them, as the King of Spain famously used to say in his Christmas speeches, “fills me with pride and satisfaction”.
In fact, one of the outlets we link to most is Business Insider, which has the healthy habit, and the rule, of linking to every source. In 2013 we sent Business Insider more than 700,000 visits from this blog. Thanks to all the media and blogs that link to BI, it is very close to overtaking the leading news outlets in the United States.
Coffee finished, let’s move on to the thank-yous.
Social media.
- Facebook, despite its algorithm changes, is still the main source of referral traffic to our blog.
- Twitter comes and goes, and it is not a social network that sends us overwhelming traffic, although this month, with the Gowex affair, it did send us a significant amount.
- LinkedIn is becoming an important part of our traffic. Even though posts there get fewer “likes”, for some reason it is already the second social network by traffic sent to us. So thank you to the professionals on LinkedIn.
- Google+ sends us the odd visit now and then, I’m not sure whether by mistake. Some say Google+ is dead, but I think it is just playing dead, and doing it very convincingly. Either that, or Google+ users don’t like our posts, which is also possible.
As a curiosity, for the first time in the four years we have been around, 48% of our traffic in June came from mobiles and tablets, so it seems the shift towards mobile devices is real.
Media and blogs.
We are deeply grateful to the following media and blogs for recognising, in a way, the work we do. In order of traffic sent in June, these are the 10 media and blogs that sent us the most referral visits:
- Infobae. Thank you for using our content and for linking to the original source.
- DirectivosPlus.com: an interesting site for professionals that covers very interesting and important topics for executives and everything related to the business world.
- Rankia.com: thanks to the many users of this financial community who use some of our articles to discuss or argue a point.
- ForoBeta: I know this well-known forum has a rule requiring a link to the original source, which deserves thanks.
- Invertia: thanks as well to the people at this financial portal.
- CannabisCafe: this forum and portal covers everything related to cannabis, so we appreciate them including us as part of the news on cannabis innovations.
- Jontrader: if this blog had not linked to us in one of its posts, I would never have heard of it. Having visited it, I must say that for trading enthusiasts it is a good site, with very interesting, well-explained and well-crafted articles. So thank you, Jon.
- Invertirenbolsa: another good site for lovers of the stock market and financial markets. Thanks for the mentions.
- 1000ideasdenegocios: thanks to Edwin Amaya, from Guatemala, for citing us in some of his articles. A real pleasure, considering that our friend Edwin’s career is taking off like a rocket.
- De10.mx: thanks to this major Mexican portal; in June we were still getting visits from articles in which it cited us months ago.
Thank you!
Featured image: Nenad Stojković, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
