When You Care Enough to Steal the Very Best

Brian Clark’s Copyblogger.com just won the 2007 Blogger’s Choice Award for Best Marketing Blog. If you do 1/10th of what this guy teaches (and he gives it away for free, folks) you’ll be rich. Which is why we were concerned to find out that someone seems to be stealing Brian’s stuff.

Not long ago we wrote “Someone Out There is Swiping Nicholas Boothman’s Stuff“ – an article about content theft on the Internet. Now, we find out, someone is stealing Brian Clark’s stuff, too.

Don’t be too alarmed. It happens all the time. Still… this one had us scratching our heads more than most.

The stunning thing about the 2007 Blogger’s Choice Award is that Brian Clark’s blog even beat Seth Godin’s Blog. Seth Godin, in case you missed the memo, is God. (Want to save yourself a lot of money in the coming year that you might be tempted to spend on Internet marketing hucksters and pitchmen? Well, just stop doing it and instead read Brian Clark and Seth Godin – and don’t read anyone else).

But, back to our topic of plagiarism. Now, just so you don’t think we’re weird, we really don’t go snooping around hoping to find instances of Internet theft. Our excuse is that we’re writing an eBook about online copyright infringement, plagiarism and other seedy shenanigans. And, for that book, we need examples.

So we tested a phrase from an older Copyblogger article (don’t know how old, because, unless I missed it, Brian, who does everything right, doesn’t date his blog posts – which drives me insane).

The phrase (in case you want to play along at home, folks) was “I’m not talking about being famous like Tom Cruise.” It comes from a post he wrote about branding called, “How to be a Rock Star in Your Niche.”

If you plunk that sentence – “I’m not talking about being famous like Tom Cruise” – into Google you’ll get several results, most of them legitimate links back to Copyblogger. One, however, just completely mystified us – for many reasons.

It would appear that a web site called KillerCopywritingBlog.com is “borrowing” Mr. Clark’s prose not only for this link – but pretty much throughout the entire blog. However, we could not find any attribution, nor so much as a thank you, to Brian Clark. What the heck?

Furthermore (and you should try this at home, kids), the KillerCopywritingBlog was downright unreadable – appearing to be a wild pastiche of clumsy copies and pastes. Hmm… truly, what is going on here?

Now, here’s the really seedy part. While KillerCopywritingBlog.com says that it belongs to the “world’s #1 website conversion expert Dan Lok” – it may well not belong to Dan, at all. Dan is a well known Internet marketing guru, who ranks #47 on the GuruDAQ.com’s “Internet Marketing Index.”

You see there are sites that simply scrape the content of other sites and slime themselves onto the Internet just for the heck of it. This one could be sliming Dan Lok’s name, as well. You never know.

And, that’s the part that makes us crazy – because many of the links actually do go to Dan Lok’s various marketing strategies. However, if you were going to steal Brian’s content and Dan’s name, wouldn’t you change all the links to your own destinations?

This whole site might just be someone’s idea of a nasty good time – sort of an Internet graffiti impulse. Or, it could be a kind of twisted affiliate marketing strategy – one that must cynically think that readers have no brain whatsoever. We’ll ask Brian and we’ll ask Dan and see if they can make some sense of it for us.

We’re just average business people trying to offer Internet research tips that are worthwhile and Internet marketing red flags that might make people stop and think. This one really made us stop and think.

Someone is stealing Brian Clark’s stuff – for no clear reason. And, if you check – you may well find they’re stealing your stuff, too.