I made a lot of mistakes when I first started blogging for clients. One of my problems was a faulty research process.
I’d often feel overwhelmed and frustrated.
Here’s where the trouble came in.
After spending hours researching, I’d end up with far too much information. It made it hard to sort through the data to find things that supported my arguments. I’m talking about struggling to ift through 20 pages of research for a 1000-word article.
My other issue was I’d often read about interesting stats, and then because it wasn’t immediatly relevant to something I’m working on, it wouldn’t always make a note of it. Then, a few weeks later, I’d be working on a post and realize I spotted the perfect stat but now, I wasn’t sure where to find it.
I’ve turned to some of the world’s top markters and bloggers to find better ways to research posts and keep track of ongoing research.
Here’s my findings.
Keep Track of Interesting Research
Once you’ve built a well of interesting potential topics, you’ve removed a alot of the heavy lifting.
How many times have you read something that was thought-provoking? These are the kinds of things that may work well in future blog posts.
Buffer has a great blog post on storing and finding the research you need.
Spy on your audience online in forums and social media.
They recommend keeping track of the interesting bits you find while reading and listening to podcasts.
If you’re looking for potential sources, I wrote an article here.
Another way to find topics ideas is using Google’s various tools. I’ve written a blog post here about how you can use Google to find topics. You can also use a tool like Feedly to stay updated with trending articles in your industry.
Researching Topics
Sometimes, the hardest part is getting started. It can be difficult to get going when you’re battling to find the right topic.
How do you research for the right topics?
HubSpot recommends a data-driven research process to identify topics:
- Identify the topics you audience wants to read about
Study your own posts and metrics. Focus on the articles with high engagement: these are the posts your audience wants to read about.
- Analyse what your competitors are writing about
You can use a tool like BuzzSumo to find articles that your competitors are writing.
- Read Your Audience’s Conversations Online
In this post on CoSchedule the advise you start with Google research when you start digging into research for your post.
When you perform a basic analysis like this, you get the type of content that is ranking for the keywords you’ve chosen.
On top of Google, you can also try a tool like Ubersuggest. You will see the top ranking articles for those keywords. Now, you can build on this and assess how you can improve on this article.
I wrote this post discussing Ubersuggest and other tools here.
Researching the Post
Once you have researched your topic and know the points you want to make, you’re going to need to back it up with research and stats.
To start, I’d suggest pulling up a Google Doc or similar file you can keep track of you research.
If you’re very familiar with the topic, start with resources like Wikipedia and videos on YouTube. Most times, you want to be writing about things you know, but this type of research is even good for a refresher.
In this post, Buffer’s Beth Copper shares how to tackles this stage:
“Once I’ve read any articles I found and I have a good idea of the keywords to use, I move on to Google Scholar and Statista to find studies and papers on my topic. I quite often find links to studies in other articles on the same topic too, which can be more efficient that trawling through pages of Google Scholar results.
“I try to limit myself to about five or six open tabs at a time. I open many more and skim them, but close the ones that aren’t useful. When I’ve got about five that seem useful, I move on to taking notes”
As you work through interesting pieces of research, this is where things can get crazy.
Joanna Wiebe from Copy Hackers has an awesome way to counter this.
Wiebe uses a tool she built called Airstory that lets you tag pieces of research. Airstory is an awesome and simple way to create content. But you could even do this in Google Docs. Leave a comment with a tag so you know exactly where to find the research.
And don’t forget, once you complete your researched article, make sure you cite all of your sources. I’ve written here about the downsides of failing to credit your sources properly.
