When you blog, you write a lot about all aspects of your niche. When you started the blog, you were eager to share what you knew about this area, and your posts consisted of your own thoughts and ideas.
However, with the passage of time, there came a time when you had already used all those ideas; It took you longer to generate new ones, and these were not as interesting or deep as the ones you had at the beginning. Right now you have a hard time finding topics for that calendar of posts that you created after reading ” How to plan a calendar of publications for your blog .”
What should you do? At this point, you turn to research. Collecting information from other pages is an important step to write posts with relevant content that also have external validation of facts, statistics and examples that illustrate your readers.
So, ultimately, writing becomes just one part of your blog project. Here are some tips that will make tackling the investigation easier, and not feel like you’re working on a boring academic project.
Use Google alerts
The first step is to determine the keywords that fit your niche. Ideally, you should choose one or more words that will be the focus of your publication and then two or three more that you will include in the body of your text. These keywords will be your guide throughout the research process. Essentially, your task will be to look for these words in different places.
The first place you should go is google.com/alerts . There you will create alerts for your keywords. You can choose if you want to receive the alerts immediately, every day or weekly. When you receive them, take a look at the links and save the ones that can help you write a post you have in hand or a future one.
Use this method on an ongoing basis to collect information that may be useful to you. You can save:
- the link to the content;
- the title of the content;
- the exact keyword or phrase you plan to use and any ideas you can expand on later;
- related keywords;
- reactions such as comments and the times the content was shared on social networks,
- backlinks from other sites to the content.
Save this information on a spreadsheet, on separate classified pages on your computer, or even on index cards. Choose the system that best suits you.
Validate your idea
Don’t you think it makes sense to make sure your post has a good chance of being popular before investing your valuable time on a certain topic?
How can you do it? Use Google or your favorite search engine to query the keywords for your topic.
- Has your competition published articles on the same topic? If you don’t find many results, maybe the topic is not popular enough. If you find a lot of articles, don’t worry about the fact that the topic has already been addressed; you have the opportunity to write improved content on the topic.
- Have other articles on the subject caused many reactions? If so, read the comments and think if you can answer the questions that have arisen.
Evaluate your research
One of the most common problems is determining whether research is reliable and of good quality. As you gain research experience, you will quickly learn to discern it.
However, at first you will need to verify the information by visiting the original source to ensure that the articles you have found are an accurate representation of it.
In summary
Don’t be afraid of investigation. It will surely seem much more interesting to you now than during your student years, when “research” seemed like a nefarious word. Researching will make your business successful, and it can be very enjoyable and instructive.
For more research tips, read ” Quick and Easy Research with Evernote ” for a guide to making research easier using Evernote.
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