You may be wondering about how to get started and what the best way to share with your audience is. We’ve got your back! We’ve put together a handy guide to help you through the onboarding process, plus 5 tips for you to share, engage and increase your affiliation customers. 

…Onboarding

Have you accessed your affiliate link yet? 

If not, watch this video to help you find it. 

How do referral links work? 

When your referrals click on your link you will receive your share from their purchases. 

We use 30 days click cookies, so even if your referrals don’t sign up the same day, they will still count as yours when they do. 

…Now that you have your affiliate link, it’s time to share it with others, woohooo!

Tip 1: Your story matters 

The best way to share is (hands down) through your personal experience! Your personal story is powerful, and users connect to your journey as a source of inspiration. Use these questions to reflect and guide you through this process.

• Where did copyright ownership help you?
• What problem did you solve?
• How did it impact your work & creation process?
• Why do you think your audience should use a service like copyrights world? 
• If you could turn back time, what things would you change, knowing what you know now? 

Tip 2: Let’s Get Loud

We’ve talked about the ‘why’ and the importance of making it personal to connect and inspire your audience. Wondering about the ‘where’ and ‘how’ to share?   

The answer is wherever you connect with your audience. This could be:

• Writing a blog post on your blog and website
• Posting on social media 
• Creating a story on instagram
• Creating a video for youtube 
• Sharing via email to your friends and co-workers
• Sharing on groups, communities and forums with people who will benefit from copyrighting their work as you did. 
• Singing a sea shanty on TikTok

Whatever your experience, is what people want to hear about!

Tip 3: Turn Your Should Haves In To Must Haves 

Remind your audience of the value of copyright protection & infringement monitoring. What can they gain from it? Aaand what do they stand to lose if they aren’t properly protected? Think of copyright protection as copyright insurance for your content, with worldwide coverage!  

It’s the foundation to build their empire! 

• If you are a writer, copyright ownership could have allowed you to self publish your book. 
• If you are a photographer, infringement monitoring could have helped you share your work more freely and keep track of who is using your photos without permission. 
• If you are an influencer or online educator, SocialProtect could have helped you prove proof of ownership in a court of law against a big brand that plagiarized your original content.  
• If you are a blogger, BlogPassport could have protected your blog posts and helped you create more revenue from it. 

Tip 4: Remember your etiquette on social media 

It’s not polite to steal. The same way you wouldn’t walk into someone’s home if they accidently left their door open (we hope), is the same way you wouldn’t share/copy/use someone’s original digital property.

If you or your audience sell digital products (like e-books, online courses), you’re probably already using social media to promote them. Remind your audience about SocialProtect – the perfect tool to help you know who is using your content without your permission. Next step, contact them to stop or make a deal to license it and make more money!

Sharing (with protection) is caring! 

Tip 5: Bookmark This Page

There is a lot of valuable information and content in this blog. We suggest that you bookmark this page and the below links to help you get the best out of your affiliate partner experience. 

Bookmark me:

• 5 Tips To Increase Your Affiliation Customers
• Knowledge Base
• Blog
• YouTube 
• Press Kit

Here’s to inspiring and empowering creators and creating more revenue for you! 

Which ones? Well if you are reading this article you already know one of the most prominent ones. If you ask any professional working on digital marketing what is the most valuable online asset for a business, you’ll get pretty the same answer. Content. And what are the top 3 the most valuable professionals? Writers/Copywriters will certainly be an answer. 

For writers and copywriters this is their opportunity to negotiate the terms of the work in all aspects, giving them the chance to achieve the thing many of us always wanted. Self employment, financial independence, flexible working hours and work from anywhere is at the reach of their hands. And this is how we see the online freelancing professional blooming.  Such freedom though, comes with certain responsibilities, skills and knowledge that a freelance writer should acquire to be successful. For that preparation and self- education is fundamental. 

The most important element of a freelance writer’s job is to write original articles that the readers will find interesting enough to read. The second one is to get ownership of their copyright, know their rights under the copyright laws and how to protect them. 

What is original work? 

According to the copyright laws, a work that has required significant mental activity to create, and is, therefore, considered original, automatically becomes its creator’s intellectual property. 

Recent studies reveal that there are over 5 billion blogs and 7 million blog posts are published every day! Such a thing leaves you wondering, are we honestly creating so much original content on a daily basis? Obviously no. 

Every writer is aware of the practises out there to plagiarize or citate content from other authors, either because they’ve done it, or because they have seen it done to them, or both. Both practises though can be copyright infringement cases, meaning you are not producing an original work, thus not entitled to copyright over it. 

To make sure you are creating a work entitled to copyright, you need to make sure your article is not infringing on someone else copyright, and that you have actually created an original work. To do that, remember two things

1. You should be mindful of how to use someone else’s work. If you just change a few sentences and don’t give credits to the author, you are plagiarising. 
2. In case you use work from another author, the best practise is to add a citation. Now if you use too many citations in your work, it’s not original anymore.   

To be certain that you are creating original work, use other authors’ work for inspiration and spend more time to work the outline of your piece to express your point of view. That’s the reason why you became a writer in the first place right?

What is copyright?

Otherwise known as “author’s right,” copyright is a legal term used to describe the rights that creators have over their intellectual property. Copyright means “the right to copy,” therefore, only the creator – or people permitted by the creator – have the right to reproduce the work.

As a creator of original work, you are awarded copyright automatically when you produce a work that is in a tangible form (i.e. blog post, article, social post, etc.). However, registering your copyright gives you additional legal protection. This is because you may need to provide proof of ownership (or strong evidence of it) in a court of law when someone uses, copies, or distributes your work without permission.

And now what?

At this point, you have created your original work, got proof of ownership for it and now as the rightful owner you are ready to go secure a sale for it. This point is critical for you as you need to understand the rights you have over your work to negotiate a beneficial deal for you. Read carefully the contracts passed to you by your collaborators or self publishing services or even social media and DO NOT give away the ownership of your copyright. 

Work for Hire

When signing a work for hire contract you are passing all the ownership of your copyright to the person who hired you. This practically means that you can no longer make any decisions or negotiate deals and income for your work. This is the reason why most of the people interested in your work would like you to do, so they can benefit from your work as rightful owners. And this is exactly why you should avoid it. 

First & Secondary serials rights

To unlock the benefits of passive income first and secondary serials rights are two terms that you should familiarize yourself with. 

As the owner of the work when closing a deal, you should make sure that you’ve only just agreed on the right to publish, and have not sold your rights to your article or piece.

To put it simply, this means that your collaborator has paid for the right to publish your original work for the first time in a specific location. 

And at this point, you are able to unlock the passive income deriving from your secondary serial rights. As the rightful owner,  you can modify, adapt or alter in any way you see fit in order to re-sell and publish your article or piece generating income from your original work. 

To sum up, to live the dream of self employment and financial freedom, you have to educate yourself on the copyright laws and the rights you have as a creator of original work.  Be very careful on the terms of your agreement to make sure you are not passing your rights over to someone else, as you will be passing over all rights to generate income from it too. 

Firstly, let’s define what “licensed revenue” is: money earned through the licensed use of intellectual property that has a copyright attached to it. More specifically, it is intellectual property that is permitted to be used by another company for profit by the copyright holder.

So, for instance, say one of your photographs is chosen for use by a travel agency for one of their campaigns. In exchange for the use of your image, you will receive a mutually agreed upon amount of money. This amount of money is called a “licensing fee.” Consequently, money collected from this is called “licensing revenue.”

The key takeaway from this type of copyright usage is the term “approved usage.” It should come as no surprise to you when you see your work being used by another commercial entity, as this type of usage has been cleared with you for usage in advance.

In order to get to the point where you are making money from your creations, it is important to create a “licensing agreement.” Such an agreement sets out the terms and conditions for usage of the materials, as well as the fee structure for its use.

You have almost certainly used intellectual property licensed for commercial purposes at some point in your life – most likely thousands of times. For instance, do you own any professional sports apparel with your team’s logo on it? Or maybe a shirt with your favorite artist’s image? If used legally, that image was licensed for use by the copyright holders by the clothing manufacturers. 

Licensing agreements can get pretty specific. For instance, some of the terms covered may include: 

• The approved geographic region for licensed usage. So, if you are licensed to use an item of intellectual property in the US but not the EU, using it in the EU would still be considered an infringement of copyright.
• The time period allotted for usage: once your time slot has expired, so does your license to use the content.
• The exclusivity (or lack thereof) of the agreement

To put things into perspective, every aspect of technology that you use on a daily basis has a copyright and someone, somewhere, holds a license to use it for which they pay. Similarly, every picture, video, song, and book has a copyright protecting its creator from unlicensed infringement. 

However, holding a copyright does not protect you from infringement if you are unaware of it, which is why features like CopyrightsWorld’s Infringement Monitoring tool exist – to protect visionaries like yourself from missing out on revenue.

Luckily, you are one of many creators today who have to work to protect their work against potential copyright infringement, be it accidental, or very much deliberate.  

We’ve boiled down the essential steps of what to do if the worst happens and you realise that, for whatever reason, your work has been stolen. 

1. Evaluate

It’s a hard pill to swallow, but it is worthwhile to step back and objectively evaluate what exactly has occurred, and what the best and worst case outcome scenarios look like. Before you engage the party that did the infringing, figure out their goals for using your content. For instance, are they using it for personal or commercial use? Based on that, decide for yourself whether you want to ask for a certain amount of money in recompense or whether it’s worthwhile pursuing legal action… or both, or neither, or something in between. 

2. Document

Screenshots and any other documentation you can collect are your best friends at times like these. A high-resolution image (with the URL included) can speak a thousand words and solidify your case against the guilty party. Include a time-stamp, if possible. In other words, anything that will amount to concrete, irrefutable proof of infringement. Moreover, continue documenting any and all communications pertaining to the infringement, whether they are with the infringer or even your own lawyer. You want a paper trail. 

3. Notify

One follow-up possibility (although it probably won’t garner you any money) is sending a takedown notice to the host or whoever manages the websites. In many countries, a takedown notice alone requires the party that has infringed on the copyright to take down the item in question, or at the very least to take some sort of action.

4. Advocate

Copyright laws are complicated on a good day, more so when infringement occurs. Laws also vary from country to country. If you have any doubts at all as to how to proceed (and you most likely will!) or even just have questions in general, now would be a great time to reach out for professional guidance. Luckily, there are many copyright protection and monitoring services, (CopyrightsWorld is one), not to mention organisations and lawyers, that are there to help you reach the right conclusions and not over or under-react. At the end of the day, many creators tend to undervalue their work, yet engaging in a lengthy legal battle can have disastrous consequences for you. This is precisely why constant professional monitoring of infringement can be a life-saver. Automating and digitizing this process, as CopyrightsWorld has done, makes it much easier to avoid copyright infringement.

5. Contact

Now comes the trickiest part… making contact with the party you think is stealing your work. Let’s be honest – there are very, very few scenarios in which personal contact with the infringer can go smoothly. Of course, resolving matters peacefully and fairly is never off the table, but there are too many cases of the exact opposite occurring for us to recommend reaching out to the other party yourself. 

Not reaching out in person is not the extent of how far you have to remove yourself from the situation, however. You must absolutely 100% refrain from posting anything whatsoever about potential infringement activity on any public medium such as social media. 

If you decide to contact the other party after all, make sure you have a clear purpose in your communications that makes it obvious what you want from the other individual: is it money? Licensing? Recognition? If it is money, attach an invoice from other work you have licensed showing approximate costs. However, if you’re unsure about the exact commercial value of your work, don’t “guesstimate”. This will make it difficult later to seek an accurate amount for your work. Avoid the topic of pricing at all until you can ask for a specific number. 

Although the famous Oscar Wilde quote “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” is true in some instances, creators like yourself can have their livelihoods destroyed by unauthorized copyright infringement. When your uniqueness is the backbone of your earnings, there is nothing more important than protecting your individuality. At CopyrightsWorld, we get it, and we’re here to be your copyrights watchdog.

Copyright infringement of digital photos differs in important ways from infringement in the markets of  music and movies. 

Opportunities for photo infringement are numerous as an infringer need not actively log into a peer-to-peer file-sharing network to infringe; one need only right-click an image found via an online search. 

It is very interesting that some infringers are unaware of the fact that they are breaching someone’s rights, or that they have any legal obligation to pay for the use of a photo. Even if they do know that they have to pay, they don’t know how much and to whom. The second fact is that infringers are typically unaware of an image’s price at the time of infringement.

While some might advocate that it’s impossible to completely prevent digital photo infringement, there are ways to protect your photos and prevent or revert their unauthorised use. 

We have picked the top five most effective things you can do to retain full control of your work – and make sure you get fairly paid.

1. Get proof of ownership by registering your copyright

When you create an original work, you are automatically granted copyright of that work, which means you can decide how it is used and distributed. 

Even though it is not mandatory, copyright registration provides valuable legal protection. It makes it easier for other people to find your protected material, and also helps you  assert your legal rights by providing date stamped evidence of the exact or approximate creation date. It can help you mitigate the risk of expensive and timely litigation, whether you are a claimant or a defendant, as you have proof of ownership. Registration is essential if you ever find yourself filing or defending an infringement lawsuit and recommended for businesses and individuals alike, who wish to protect the inherent value of their work.

Read more about the importance of copyright registration explained by General corporate lawyer Harender Branch, from UK law firm Branch Austin.

2. Use a copyright notice

Displaying a copyright notice, such as ‘© All Rights Reserved,’ has not been a legal requirement in the US since 1989. It does, however, clearly identify you as the copyright holder, thereby decreasing the likelihood it will be used without authorization and bolstering legal evidence in the case that it is.

If your photo is used online without your consent, you can assume that the user knew that the photo was copyrighted. This is a very good example of how a copyright notice can help as evidence of ownership in case of legal dispute.

3. Watermark your work

A watermark is a very prominent way of protecting your work and showing evidence of copyright ownership but unfortunately not one you can fully trust. Watermarks can be removed with a series of photo editing software and apps. 

The best method to apply watermarks is that of randomised digital watermarking. This method is based on constantly changing the watermarks’ shape and design before being applied on your photo. While it is effective it enhances an already existing challenge with watermarks which is the final design. With randomised digital watermarking, you can’t have any control over the final result and its effects on your photo. 

4. Digital sign all your photos

A very good way to have a proof of ownership is by digitally signing all of your photos. If you use this method, you can control the final outcome of your photo since it does not affect the visual of your work. In simple words, a digital signature is a photo attribute that’s not visible on your photo, until someone downloads the file. 

Upon downloading it, the user has to either not use the photo or remove the signature by cropping it out. This is a very strong evidence of photo infringement as the user intentionally breaches copyright when cropping your signature out of the photo. 

5. Use an active protection & monitoring service

While all the ways described above could work, they require your time and energy and they still don’t cover one big need. Knowing who is using your work without your consent. The web is vast and you can’t always know who is infringing your right. 

Using a copyright protection and monitoring service, such as the one offered by CopyrightsWolrd, can make the protection of your rights much easier and efficient. When you upload your file you obtain indisputable evidence of copyright ownership in your email. Then with a simple click, you can add your files for infringement monitoring and receive reports when your rights are breached. 

This way you can be certain that your rights as a creator are protected and spend more time creating more of work than worrying about how to protect it. 

Conclusion 

Photo theft is a cruel reality enabled by the technology we all hold in our hands every day and while it can be hard to eliminate it, we can find new ways to protect our intellectual property by deterrenting potential attempts or acting on the ones that have already happened.