Conducting research is an essential part of writing quality blog content. To be a credible industry expert, you need facts, stats, figures, and examples at your disposal — all external validation that shows you know your stuff.
But doing research can be very time consuming if you’re not sure what you should be looking for and how to look for it.
In this post I will take you through a four-step process for researching your blog posts. This process will help you validate your blog ideas, fill your posts with interesting and relevant content, and increase the chance your readers will engage with you. Once you fine-tune this process, it shouldn’t take longer than an hour to do research for each blog post.
Let’s dive right in.
Step 1: Set up a system to capture notes.
During my research for this post, I noticed a common gap in some of the content available on the topic. Not many people had spoken about the value of creating a system to capture your research. For me, this is perhaps the most important step because it gives structure to the research process.
When creating your note taking system, some information you’ll want to consider capturing includes:
- The link to the content
- The title of the content
- The exact keyword phrase(s) you plan on using and any interesting points you can expand on later
- Related keywords
- Amount of engagement, such as social shares or comments
- Backlinks from other sites to the content
You may like to capture all of these factors, or alternatively you can choose the ones that best suit you. Everyone will have his or her own way of capturing this information, but an Excel Spreadsheet is a good place to start. For something specifically designed for note capture you may like to try out Evernote.
