You are small business owner attempting to do the job of a blogger. Or perhaps you are a staff member who’s been assigned the blogging responsibilities for your company. In either case, it’s easy to become exasperated by blogging after doing it long enough. You run out of ideas; you feel like you’re talking about the same things over and over again; you can’t seem to create anything fresh or exciting. Here at Connotations, we know all about the challenges of creating killer blog content. Blogging is one of the services we offer our clients. Through years of providing this service, we have come up with some research techniques that make it possible for us to keep blog content fresh, creative, and dynamic week after week.
We don’t want to give away all of our trade secrets (we still have to make a living, too), but we thought it might be productive for our readers to learn some of the research techniques our writers use to generate blog content, content such as this Tips for Christmas Copywriting post we produced for our own blog. We have put together brief descriptions of some of the techniques we think will be most helpful.
Killer Blog Content Research Technique #1: Devour the News
The whole point of regular blogging is to keep your readers informed about what’s going on in your world. You may be offering commentary, advice, or instructions on a certain aspect of your industry, but the point is still the same. One of the best ways to stay up-to-date yourself is to devour the news. Be a consumer of news – especially news relating to your industry or other things that would interest your readers – whenever you have spare time to commit to reading.
We work with a number of clients involved in addiction recovery. Just by scouring various news sources every day, we find lots of fresh ideas that create killer blog content. Without being news junkies ourselves, we would probably not be so productive as bloggers.
Killer Blog Content Research Technique #2: Build a Knowledge Database
Killer blog content often involves facts, figures and other easily referenced material. The thing to be careful of is spending more time than you can afford to research these kinds of things. Building a knowledge database is a good strategy in this regard.
For example, let’s say you are researching statistics relating to car prices for your next blog post. The data you find will be applicable to what you’re writing today, but it also might prove invaluable in the future. Save that data somewhere – perhaps in a document on your hard drive or just as a link that you can go back to in the future. Building a database of factual knowledge essentially creates a library of facts, figures and other reference material you can use time and again.
Killer Blog Content Research Technique #3: Scour Government Websites
Government websites offer a plethora of helpful information on a seemingly endless list of topics. One of our favourites is the GOV.UK website. You can find information relating to pensions, driving licences, taxes, employment status, and literally thousands of other topics. And because it is a government website that’s designed to be impartial, you can trust what you find – most of the time.
As an added bonus, referencing government websites in your blog (and linking text to the site) adds credibility to your post where search engines are concerned. That means government websites offer a dual benefit. If there’s anything on a government site that pertains to what you are writing about, find a way to use it.
Creating killer blog content is not a matter of good luck or happenstance. It requires solid research and some hard work. Hopefully, the three research techniques we have offered here will make you a better blogger in the future. As always, don’t hesitate to contact Connotations if we can help you develop your website. Our staff of writers would be more than happy to create blog posts for you so that you can concentrate on more important aspects of your business.