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If you are a beginner in the web, you may not notice that a Policy will help you a lot to restrict user from stealing or violating content from your blog. Policies like term of use, privacy policy or copyright are designed to defend and protect your content from stealer and spammer.
What is a Policy?
Policy is a kind of agreement or rules for your blog. Policy exist to control some bad event to happen to your own blog. Policy also become the best tool to protect your reader against some suckers to harvest your reader’s private data.
Type of Policy
There are numerous of Policy type. But generally, there are 4 Common Policies for your blog:
- Comment policy
- Copyright
- Privacy Policy
- Term of Use
Comment policy and Copyright is the most crucial agreement in your blog. While the rest is depend on the element that you put on your blog.
Comment Policy control how your user may give a feedback. If they violate the policy, you reserve the right to delete their comments without further information or approval. This is very useful when you received spamming message or some activities to get your SEO benefits from your blog (if you are a do-follower) by leaving un-related comments.
Copyright also is one of the rules that you should set clearly instead of the putting up a single line of “Copyright 2007 by yourname and your blog”. You will need to define what is the value of that is protected under the copyright protection. So, in the future, if somebody happened to duplicate your content without permission, you have the right to pursue this in court.
How the Policy could help your Reader?
Let’s take Comment policy as an example. In the content of the policy, you have written clearly that every comment, especially for the first-timers, their comments will be held for moderation and awaiting for your approval before showing up on the comment section.
This could clear up any confusions between the readers and you when they submit their comments and they might be worried that they don’t see it immediately on your blog.
You also can use the comment policy to explain your reasoning on why the comments must be held for moderation.
The most important, It could protect your creativity!
Another example is Copyright policy. This problem is common and most likely will happen to you if you have great content in your blog. Some lazy people out there will try many steps to copy your valuable content and make it as their content effortlessly!
The most tricky users are those that translate all your content to their own language and turn it to their original content.
To make sure this problem won’t happen, you should write it all postings and protected under the copyright policy. State everything clearly that any kind of activities to reproduce in different language, or republishing is prohibited because it’s protected by the law and international treaty. 
International treaty? Yup, every content of your blog is protected seamlessly by a law.
So, will you set any policies to protect your reader and yourself from any unwanted experience?
Decide it yourself.
This is a guest post by Ken Xu, the author and owner of Mysites-Advisor.com. Regularly posting about blogging tips and Personal Improvement Matters. Do visit his blog to received daily updated tips and tricks to improve your blog visibility and performance.
Some people just steal
and when you contact them they tell you they didn’t know about your Privacy Policy or Terms of Use. Also a good post thx
95% of internauts never or barely see the rules, TOS, policy etc links. 99% of those can`t care less about.
Same as, while install one software, most everybody keep clicking “next”, same on registering in a site - all just click “agree” and goes on. that because
- either they think all looks same and present same thing, even in allmost same words, so once one have read very few, will give up reading later;
- either they think they won`t break any rule;
- either they do not know that there may be important stuff.
Very good, Kuanhong, that you have writed about this subject, it should be more promoted.
Truth is that commenters in blogs are also bloggers and often they manage to stay decent.
Biggest problem is about copyrighting, while pics, texts, wehatever, all can be simply copy-pasted or, reff to blogs, taken thru rss readers (splogging).
Me, personaly, I am not at all a fan of keep in moderation firt-time-commenters, yet I watch very close activity on my pages (several times a day) while others may not want or may not have the chance ..
I treat comments depending on content of comment and not at all depending on who have writed .. probably this is one of reasons i`m not foreign affair minister of my country :-))
I called mine Disclosure and left it on the top prominent area of my site bar. Most readers really do not care about it. I must admit that it’s kind of lengthy but it protects everyone somehow or other. Good sharing here.