March 2, 2007 11:21
Category: Writing
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The net represents movement of large amount of traffic in every possible direction. If ever it is possible to get a pictorial view of traffic on the net, it must surely be mind-boggling in the least.
Imagining it theoretically, leaving aside search engines and large e-commerce sites, without doubt the vast chunk of traffic goes to websites that offer an endless array of information. Among them must rank the big news portals and indeed article directories.
In case of news portals (and I'll include sites like Wikipedia, though strictly speaking, they don't belong to that genre), contents are automatically added and freshened because that is what they are for. In comparison, article directories are a new phenomenon.
The need for it was not felt in initial stages as the web developed. Later, the concept of archiving well-narrated articles came upon us like a big wave. Today, just as blogs and forums have become hugely popular, the directories for articles too are considered inseparable necessities of web-life.
In fact, so overwhelming is their fallout that 2 concurrent trends have emerged almost in unison.
- Many blog-sites have become repositories of niche articles, which is a far cry from what blogs were at first thought to be. An example of blog-turned-article bank is my own website on search engine marketing. But then, blogs per se tread the narrow path of niches.
- There has been a phenomenal growth of article directories, what with new entrants emerging every other day. I should know because not a week passes without my getting invited to contribute articles to new ones that have only recently been started.
This is considered good because
content writers have ready takers of their creation, albeit without remuneration. But have we considered how they can also be a resource for article writing?
No, I'm not referring to adding contents by simply lifting articles from the directories (more on this here). My contention is that just as tools like Google Alerts can help you with daily inputs of latest happenings so as to trigger a writing idea, the directories too can do wonder to your writing effort.
If so, how do you proceed? The trick lies in making use of rss feeds that are provided by big article directories. Say you write on landscaping and gardening. In order to remain informed of latest articles, directories like Ezine Articles (www.ezinearticles.com) can be a great help.
Choose its rss feed that is about landscaping and gardening and put it into a feed-reader like MyYahoo, FeedReader or FeedBurner or any other (you've to subscribe or download). Once done, you'll start receiving freshest articles from Ezine Articles.
With the help of rss feed, you can set free flow of article information on auto-pilot, similar to Google Alerts. Check the articles that are written from all over globe, and very shortly you'll discover that you've plenty of writing ideas crowding in your head.
As you can see, article directories have this one great use for you and me, the writers, to get provoked into writing the next piece. It's specially helpful if you've several sites to cater to, for no matter how expert you are, at times it becomes tough to generate articles if you've been at it for a long stretch of time.
Coming back to where we started, if we appreciate that the only way to attract and sustain steady flow of traffic is by generating enough contents, we will also perforce agree that article banks / repositories are a special entity to ably serve our requirement.
Ok, enough of saying. Let's begin exploring LookSmart's Find Articles, the supposed-to-be mother of all article directories.
