As to people paying for blog posts, it happens all the time. The person I refer to in this post knew his English skills were lacking and thought by purchasing some “professionally written” content he could better market his blog – salt the site with some good stuff as it were.

I haven’t been hired to write for blogs (most don’t offer enough to make it worth my while) but I have written articles for people with weak English skills to use as Digg & StumbleUpon bait to get folks visiting their sites. I think as a rule people are more willing to forgive imperfect grammar and spelling once they get to ‘know’ a blogger but that it is quite difficult to gain a following without having some better content that functions as, well, bait.

To clarify in case it wasn’t clear, the person who purchased the stolen content has never been a client of mine. I only ‘met’ him after I emailed him about the content being stolen. He used a cheap writer he found/met on a forum from a country where writers can afford to write for slave wages. Of course even slave wages can be profitable when you are only taking 5 minutes to search a topic, find someone else’s article, and change the title.

Thanks again for stopping by and posting a comment.

I have to admit, though, that I’m a bit stuck on paying someone to write your blog…

The writing itself gave away the theft long before I found the original source. As a writer, I might be more likely to spot this sort of thing but the things that gave this article away should be fairly easy to spot by non-writers as well. I thought it would be helpful to others if I shared some of the things I look for when reviewing content to determine if it is indeed stolen. Hopefully, I can prevent someone else from posting stolen content on their site and help them to spot these crooks before they too get taken.