Good content is what helps people earn money. If your website, blog, advertising, etc. offer interesting and engaging content, people will be curious and will come to you for whatever reason you want them to. Creating great content on a regular basis is quite a difficult job. You should know what people need and predict what will thrill them. If you are in it for a long run, you probably want to focus on creating superb content that you always need a research for. So, let’s talk about this research and skills that will make you the best in it. Let’s start with how you should conduct a research. We will focus on texts as the biggest kind of content out there.
Choose the type of content
Thinking of a topic and what content your future text should contain, you need to decide what type of article suits best. Often certain article types are better for certain topics. The most common types are the following.
- News. Such articles contain the information on what has happened recently or what will happen in near future. Usually such post answers questions like who/what, when and where, why and what for.
- Big post in an online magazine or journal. Such articles offer more detailed posts with interesting information. It can be about a person, event, phenomenon, place or any other subject.
- Personal opinion. Such article contains author’s thoughts on a certain matter.
- Instruction. It is usually a step-by-step guide for doing something.
- Biographical sketch. Such articles offer information about a person collected through interviews and studying different material.
Choose a topic
If you are free to choose topics, then it is your next step. Picking a topic depends on a number of different aspects. The two main rules are that it should be interesting for you to write and for a certain group of people to read. For choosing a topic that will be interesting for people, you also need to make a research. You can, for example, visit some topical forums and see what questions people ask. Usually, people ask about something when they fail to find it online, so you can use it to your advantage.
Make a preliminary research
If you don’t know the topic very well, you need to start with a preliminary research. Google the topic you are going to write about. Read as much information on the subject as you can. Read articles, blogs, interviews, etc. If there is not enough information online, visit a library.
Collect the material
After you know some facts about your topic, you should start searching for the information you will use for your content. You can use any available sources for that starting with the Internet and finishing with the library.
Now, when you know the common steps for making a proper research, we can move to the research skills. All the research skills can be acquired, so even if you don’t possess some of them, you can easily develop them with the right amount of time and dedication. So, here we go.
- The ability to find good sources of information
They say that it is not about how much information you know but about how fast you can find it when needed. Knowing where to look and how to look is a very useful research skill. This skill probably comes with experience. If you’ve used dictionaries for a couple of years, you can probably find required information twice as fast as people who don’t work with them often. Or, for example, if you often write about, let’s say, legal matters, you know which books contain great information and which books are useless.
- Planning skill
In order to optimize your work on content, you should develop your planning and organizing skills. Everything goes better with the right amount of planning and with a successful strategy. So, while making a research, you should work on a plan for your future content. You can develop and rewrite this plan later when you find more information or change the course of your work.
- Communication skills
This skill is required when you need to communicate to get information. For example, you may need to take interviews or make polls or the information you are looking for can be quite rare and you may need to go to the libraries or universities and ask people.
- The ability to make notes
Making the right notes is a very big part of a good research. If you are making a big decent research with going to a library and everything, you can not do without it. Remember that after finding all the information, you need to collect it all together; and sometimes there can be so many long and unorganized notes that you can easily get lost in them. Developing one strategy for your notes can be the right move. You can make lists, write every part on a different piece of paper, use colored highlighters or make sketches. Making notes on paper has many advantages over typing on your laptop, for example, or copying some pages from a book. You will remember the material better and that will help you write a deeper piece.
- Motivation
This is not exactly a skill but is the thing that can make any research more efficient. If you have a good motivation, you will put more time and effort into your research and the results will probably be much more impressive. Motivation can be different for everyone. Someone’s motivation is money, some are motivated by the success of their content and someone feel inspired by providing valuable material for people with their texts. If you don’t have any motivation, it is very hard to create something worthy.
Making a research is what every content maker faces regularly. Many writers and content managers often focus on improving their writing skills while paying no attention to researching skills. Maybe a good research is exactly what stops you from being the best in your business. Try to work on these skills and maybe you will see a huge difference.