Jul 19 2008
What is Creative Commons & How it can Help you – how to get free advertising for your blog
Before I go ahead and let you in on the secret to getting free advertisement for your yummy food photography, I want to tell you about Creative Commons.
What is Creative Commons?
Share, Remix, Reuse — Legally Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.”
So…to put it simply: if you want to partially copyright your work, this is what you want. See their FAQs for more information.
What are your options?
You can pick, choose, and combine any of these as you see fit for all your work or each individual item:
(quoted from Creative Commons – License your work – go here for more information)
Attribution. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.
Noncommercial. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only.
No Derivative Works. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.
Share Alike. You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.
For example, my blog, my website, and my photos are all licensed under the Creative Commons license of Attribution Non-commercial (by-nc). So, all of you out there who want to take my pictures, blog them, use them on your website, etc are free to do so as long as you say the work is mine and don’t make money off of it.
SO, if people want to use your work commercially (make money off of it), they still have to contact you, ask, and get your permission. You can then choose on a case-by-case basis if you want to let that person use it for free, have them pay you for it, or not allow them to use it at all.
Now, I want to get to that secret on how to get free advertising for your blog or photography:
USE CREATIVE COMMONS.
It’s that simple. Allow others to advertise your work for you.
For example, if I see a great blog post, recipe, or photo somewhere, I can copy and paste it, say who’s it is and where it came from. With an ALL RIGHTS RESERVED copyright I’d have to get your permission first, and only IF I get permission, can I use your work. This takes time and kills spontaneity.
Here’s an example of some great photos that I can share with you because of the Creative Commons License:
chocolate_monster_mel/Flickr
Smaku/Flickr
chocolate_monster_mel/Flickr
chez_pim/Flickr
Darwin_Bell/Flickr
Here are links to photos I could not post here because they are not under Creative Commons:
What are you waiting for?? Let the world advertise for you! Use Creative Commons.
I agree with you. Words of mouth is the best advertising because it does not require time or resources from you. As long as you get full credits, let the others spread the words that they like what you do.
For the URL, make it easy for your readers and point to the specific post and not just the blog. It also shows more respect to the author’s work.
http://www.opensourcefood.com/