According to Creative Commons, your original content on your blog post is automatically copyrighted. You still might want to make your desires clear to readers who’re interested in using your material.

Your simplest option is to put a copyright notice in the footer of your blog to cover all the content of your blog.  You could also choose to put a copyright symbol at the bottom of every post or under a photo.

To make the copyright mark, just use the “insert custom character” feature in your blog editor (In WordPress, the icon looks like an omega: Ω). Insert the copyright symbol and type the year and your name… © 2013 Your Name.

I might eventually put a watermark on our most popular photos on our blog, MikeandSus.org. For now, I state that all our original photos are copyrighted by our family in the footer.  I haven’t decided if I need to add watermarks, or even want to. (I’ll use Picasa if I do this. Here’s a link to try  PicMarkr if you want to start watermarking.) 

Creative Commons Licensing

I like to use Creative Commons licenses to allow others to use my content. So far, I’ve been using the license you see at the bottom of this post. This license asks the user to attribute the post back to me, to not use it for profit, and to not modify it. Learn about the different licenses that are available here.  (The licenses are available in 24 languages.)

Now that you know the different options, use this easy license picker to get the code for your specific post and license. If you like the license I’m using, just make the same selections in the screenshot at the top of this post. When you copy the code, you’ll need to paste it into the text tab of your WordPress editor, not the visual version. (Blogger has an HTML tab.)

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In this series

1.  What to Do about Duplicate Content
2. How to Copyright Your Blog Post
3. Guest Posts, Licensing, and SEO

How to Copyright Your Blog Post by Sus Schmitt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.