The ability to create fresh content quickly and easily is one skill you must master if you want your content marketing efforts to succeed. Unfortunately, the research required to create fresh content often ends in frustration, primarily because you find different headlines that point to the same content.
Wasting valuable content creation time on research is not my idea of a good time! With search engines more focused than ever on penalizing websites with duplicate content, it’s imperative that your content be unique and of high quality.
Furthermore, if you want to create a loyal following, than you must create content that hasn’t been seen at least a half-dozen times elsewhere.
The problem is, how do you find quality research material while drowning in a sea of misinformation?
Listed below are several ideas you can use to overcome misinformation and create fresh content quickly and easily.
Obviously, the first step is to decide what topic you need to research. Let’s use content creation, for example.
Most people start at Google’s home page, perform a few keyword phrase searches, then stop there. Not necessarily the best place to start, but at least it’s a start.
However, if you want to find better content online from which to do your research, than we’re going to have to dig deeper. Let’s roll…
In addition to Google’s main search page, there are several other tools you can use to perform content research. For instance, you can search Google Groups. There you’ll find people who are discussing items related to your topic.
Looking up content creation in Google groups we discover that there are 29,300 related items. This is useful information, because it gives you an “inside look” at what people are talking about.
Next, let’s head over to Google News and see what’s going on there. As of this writing, there are 69,500,000 news items listed by Google on the word content creation. That’s a lot of information from which to choose for your research.
But wait, there’s more!
Google Insights is just that, an insight into search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. With Google Insights you can see what the world is searching for.
Another tool for content research, is simply to insert the plus sign “+” (without quotation marks) into your keyword search phrase – keep the punctuation just as you see it below:
+ insert search term here +free +filetype:pdf
What you receive when you use this search format, is free downloads in pdf format related to your subject.
Obviously, you can not simply copy and paste any information you may find and claim it as your own. You must create content in your own words. However, there’s nothing against you summarizing what you may find, either.
For example: “Content Creation Update: What’s New This Week!”
And lastly, let’s hop over to Yahoo and see what we can dig up there…
Using Yahoo Alerts for content creation research is a good way to diversify the content you find online. This helps to ensure that your research doesn’t become “lopsided” due to information coming from just one search engine.
When you click on Yahoo Alerts you’ll have the option of choosing which source you receive updates from. Using Keyword News, I create alerts based on the keywords and keyword phrases I am targeting for my content creation research.
I choose to have a daily email sent to me, which provides me a list of sites where my keywords and phrases are found. You can also choose to have them sent to you as they happen, but this can end up being a distraction after awhile, especially if they start showing up on your desktop alerts ever few minutes.
These are just a few of the methods you can use to create fresh content quickly and easily. Again, don’t be apprehensive about branching out and exploring new ways to perform content research. You never know, you just very well could discover new and better ways for creating unique content.
Don’t forget to leave a comment and share your thoughts on this post.
- James
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