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Googling
for Fun & Profit Ever
looked at a list of markets and thought, "Yeah, I could write for
them," then drawn a complete blank when trying to come up with an
appropriate idea? It happens to all of us. Well,
there is a solution! Free
word association has been a writing tool for generations. You group together
some random words and see what sort of story results. Directed word association
is the same sort of thing, but you are after a definite theme. Say
there is a magazine out there calling for articles on bikes and safety. You have
looked at their writers' guidelines and read a few back issues but still nothing
pops. So, try turning to the Internet. Go to Google, or any of the other search
engines, and type in "bike safety." Turns
out there is a Bike Safety Institute with an online quiz and information. There
are sites from governments, councils, schools, and a whole bunch of things.
Plus, the ever-present eBay provides suggestions of things to buy. Now
you can see a few ways for your article to go. It could have a list of all the
places where you can find great information to engage your child in learning
about safety. Or maybe you could write an article on helmets. And
the best part of all, is the research is right there at your fingertips. Of
course, nothing on the Internet is to be trusted unless you can back it up with
reputable sources, but it is a great place to start. But
what if you get too much information? Try narrowing your search. Try for
information just from the area the magazine covers (say New York); just type in:
"bicycle safety" "New York." If
you get a whole lot of pages that are just rubbish, or worse, too risqué for a
writer who is trying to concentrate (but too curious not to click and see), try
adding the word ‘not’ to your searches: bicycle
and safety not sexy. This
means; ‘look for any pages with the words bicycle and safety,
then take out all the ones with the word sexy and just show me the rest.’
(Although, you know, leaving sexy in could make for a really fun article.
Not one likely to be published in ‘Kids Safety,’ though.) So
what if you can’t find any information? Try thinking of another way you can
say the same thing, like bike instead of bicycle, prevent
injury instead of safety. It is amazing the difference one word can
make. Bike, bicycle, and cycle bring up completely
different results. Another
tip is to try a different search engine. Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com)
gives different results than Google (http://www.google.com).
Ask Jeeves (http://www.ask.com) gives you some
pages none of the others do because it is targeted more at kids. Special
interest topics sometimes have their own very specialized search engines too. Or
try a web ring. These are websites that are linked together because they cover
the same topic, but sometimes in very different ways. You can find them by going
to the links pages, or looking down the bottom of web pages and looking for the
word ring. Try typing in something from the same general topic and go
searching through the ring. Or look in web ring pages like WebRing (http://www.webring.org/rw). Links
pages can also get you to the little nooks and crannies of the Internet where
the really fun information hides. Most
of all, just be prepared to come at the whole thing from a completely different
angle. Free word association can work here too. Would you believe that typing in
the words apple bike into Yahoo gives you 618,000 websites to look at?
Got to be an article there somewhere. Karen Fainges has her own ezine for business and
computing tips and has published some courses with Boston Reed. A computer tutor
for more than seven years, she escapes from the weirdness that is a computer,
into writing fiction. If
you would like to read more, or publish some of her work, click on http://www.geocities.com/faingesk.geo/writing.htm
for fiction. Or
http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/kfainges/news.htm
for samples of nonfiction. |
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