Transparent Topic: Fraud
Last December I was working hard on our TV niche built-in and hadn't put much thought into my post for the next day. I did a little searching and ran across a great tutorial on Save-on-crafts.com for iced branches. I literally copied and pasted the entire post! It's not as bad as it sounds...I didn't try to make this look like original content. I wrote in the post, "I ran across a great tutorial that was just screaming to be passed on." I even linked to the craft site 7 different times. You can read the original post here.
So here's where the transparency and fraud part come into play. This one post has single-handedly made my blog explode in terms of stats. I went from having 800 pageviews (on a good day) to consistently having closer to 7,000-8,000 pageviews/day. I know this is still relatively small but in terms of where I came from it was a huge jump.
So far this month, this one post has had over 33,000 views.
So, I've had to reply to every email and to the big craft site and tell them the truth...it's not my original content! I feel kinda silly but honestly, I never tried to deceive anyone. My suspicion is that people see the pretty picture and jump straight to the tutorial, hence skipping over my disclaimer that I'm passing on a tutorial.
Since I've recently added Google Adsense, this nice little increase in traffic has literally paid off for me. I'm completely reaping the benefits from something I didn't do. Is that okay?
It's a hard one to swallow that I work my tail off creating huge projects like our Diamond Wall, creative shelving and even building an arbor in our daughter's bedroom and these don't solicit nearly the traffic/attention that this one post has!
What do you think? Should I feel bad about this or should I sit back and enjoy the benefits from a pin going viral?
