If you’re going to build websites quickly and efficiently, you’re going to want quick and easy access to content.

In this endeavor, Gmail can be your best friend.

Gmail now offers more than 2 Gigabytes of space, and is a perfect place for you to collect articles about all niche topics. It has a brilliant search engine attached, and you can also manually sort your email into folders that Gmail calls “Labels”.

Armed with a new Gmail account (email me at wendy at publishingcentral dot com if you want an invite), head over to the Article Announce list at Yahoo Groups and sign up with your Gmail account.

Then head over to Amazines to subscribe to the topics that you’d like sent to you.

You might also want to sign up for the EzineArticles.com New Article Email Alert Service, which doesn’t send you the articles, but rather points to new articles on their website that match your topic criteria.

There are plenty of other places to get articles too, but this is a great place to start. You can start your article database right away, and find your own flow and methods to sort and search the articles.

I’ll include a list of other article directories in a future post. For article directories that don’t offer email announcements of new articles, I search manually every now and then, and copy/paste and email interesting articles I think I may be able to use to my Gmail account.

Why not just use your current email client?

First, if you collect tens of thousands of emails in many Windows-based email clients, they become slow and unstable. If you don’t backup your email data, you run a serious risk of the files becoming corrupt, and losing all your articles… along with anything else you’ve been saving in your email client.

Second, when you search, you’ll be searching through all your other personal, business and miscellaneous emails as well, making your work more difficult when you want quick and easy access to all articles. If you save all your articles in a Gmail account dedicated to that purpose, your searching will be accurate, fast and brilliantly efficient.

Third, Gmail shows Adsense ads along side the email, which gives you a really easy and effortless way to get a ’sneak peek’ at the sorts of ads Google thinks are relevant to each. This can give you great clues as to which articles are going to do exceptionally well, and which are duds.

I’ve tried working with articles in other ways, but Gmail works best for me.

I’ve always been a person that looks on the bright side of things. Therefore, I’ve not become overly emotional at the pre-election posturing that’s been going on prior to the soon-to-happen (I hope) Canadian federal election.

Frankly, I can’t see an outcome in which “my side” loses… my side being neither Conservative nor Liberal, but decidedly pro-freedom and strongly against “strong federalism.”

If the Liberals win, there will undoubtedly be a referendum in Quebec in which the separatists win, as Quebeckers realize that not only is the rest of Canada a different country, it’s a different planet.

That will lead to a re-working of the Federalist system, whether or not Quebec is a part of it, that will shrink Federal powers and transfer most of the responsibility to the Provinces.

And if Quebec cuts all ties, most of the worst Liberal politicians and bureaucrats will no longer be Canadians, and therefore will not be eligible for those cushy elevated-welfare positions any longer, saving countless taxpayer dollars. Coooool.

If the Conservatives win a minority (I seriously don’t think there’s a chance for a majority this time around), they can ally themselves with the Bloc on issues that shrink central power in Ottawa. On all other issues, the two parties are not likely to move anywhere — nor are the NDP or Liberals likely to agree on social/economic issues with the PCs. So the only place for manoevering, if Harper holds his ground and doesn’t become a socialist, is on the shrinking of the Ottawa bureaucratic powerhouse.

And, to be frank, if those two parties can get together and agree that the provinces should not be interefered with in their choices, methods of delivery, and methods of financing those things that are constitutionally in Provincial jurisidction, there is very little need for Harper and Duceppe to agree on social issues. Alberta can do what it wishes in regards to day care, health care and education, and Quebec can do the same. No problemo. No need for federal debate or argument.

Cool once again.

So I’m looking forward to spring elections. I already know I’m going to win.

Since my initial posts on the Friends in Business message board, I’ve received countless emails about my methods of quickly creating large niche websites that don’t include search engine spam or valueless pages of junk.

I’ve decided, therefore, to create a section of my blog dedicated to detailing my methods and answering questions about one-day or weekend site creation.

Stay tuned for future posts — hopefully about one a day — about mastering the tricks, techniques and software needed to become a weekend web warrior.

Anyone who has followed a little bit of my site building knows that I’m a fan of Duncan Carver’s Link Managment Assistant.

And if you’ve read my blog for a while, you know I’ve been experimenting with Exitpoint ads in order to monetize external links on some of my quickie sites.

Why I haven’t tied the two together before tonight, I don’t know. But it’s a natural fit… LMA allows the import of huge numbers of links, organized in whatever way you choose. And with Adsense on each page, and ExitPoint on each link, monetizing those pages is doubly effective.

The only change I had to make to LMA was to remove the class and target info from the links, and add the Exitpoint javascript to the top of the category, subcategory and search templates. Once that was done, the code worked perfectly.

My business partner is the guy who deals with all the security issues involved in our business, so I rarely pay attention to the protective measures he’s taken to prohibit port scans, banning troublesome IP addresses and the like.

But recently he banned the entire IP range of one particular company, and that, to my knowledge, is a first for us.

The company is Cyveillance, and they’ve probably sent their spybots to your sites recently too.

While they claim to be entirely above board, their operation seems… well… creepy.

You can read more here at Ian’s privacy and security site.