Finding original ideas for articles is not easy. I write about a whole range of different subjects and try to be original in my subject matter. Like many of you, I may have an original idea and it may do well on Triond.
Then the ‘idea copiers’ start work. They see someone else’s idea and think, ‘Yea, I could write an article about that. I’ll just grab twenty pictures and write a line or two underneath them and I’ll do well’. What actually happens is the social bookmarking sites soon get saturated with articles about the same thing and the idea is no longer original. Everybody loses in the long run as no one bothers to read them anymore.
Many writers are also unaware that search engines like Google and Yahoo need at least 400 words of text so that their robots can scan your article and catalogue it. An article consisting of pictures and hardly any text is difficult for them to log and may be rejected because of that. If you aren’t in the search engine listings you may as well give up once your friends have read your article.
The internet moves very quickly and what was interesting and original today can be copied in a hundred places by tomorrow. You can’t copyright ideas.
A good example was an original article I did on trees. Within a week there was a whole collection of them on Triond. Icebergs, Fruit, Bats, and Seahorses were good ideas to write about at the time but soon became swallowed up among the dozens of new articles on the same subjects.
Nelson Doyle https://www.triond.com/users/Nelson+Doyle used to compile lists of useful websites and did rather well at it until lots of others jumped on the bandwagon.
Judy Sheldon https://www.triond.com/users/Judy+Sheldon/ wrote some brilliant stuff about spices in the diet. What an original idea, until the idea was copied by many others.
As I said before, ideas cannot be copyrighted. Writers can write about what they wish, even if the subject has been covered before.
However, many people are missing the point. In the short term, if you copy someone else’s idea you may be able to generate a lot of reads between your loyal readers and followers but you will not gain in the long run. Once the search engines get packed with very similar article titles, nobody wins. Anyone searching a particular subject has just too many choices. So, long term, you will get no traffic.
It is to everyone’s advantage for writers to find truly original subject matter to write about. Short term reads are not going to bring you long term earnings. Find a particular angle on an ordinary subject, look at it in a different way, change the perspective and don’t just churn out new versions of old ideas.
I have just gone through the Triond recently published list and I found at the most 3 new ideas. The rest had all been done before. Imagine what the selection in a bookshop would be like if they only kept books on specific subjects. You would expect there to be a range of items for you to browse through, no matter what your interests. Triond needs to do the same.
So, why not stop rehashing old ideas and come up with some really original stuff. If we produce more variety of articles, on more subjects, Triond will be able to expand its advertising revenue and we, the writers will benefit.
