Research Is The Foundation: How I Do Research To Craft Compelling Content

Let's talk about research today. If you write long-form, as I do, research is your #1 weapon of choice to separate yourself from the competition. Look, there is nothing more frustrating than Googling a topic and finding an article that checks all the right boxes, only to find out that it was a shoddy piece of work with no real research.

What are you doing when you run into one of these keyword soup disasters? I don't know about you, but I am punching out and looking for something worth my time. Let’s walk through my process of conducting research, what works, and what you should really avoid.

Thorough Research IS That Important For Content

There are about a million different ways to be a professional writer, and while they all have core key components (writing is still pretty muchly writing, and most of it centers around trying to sell something), long-form content is a lot different than, say, ghostwriting social media content or writing emails.

No offense, but getting the voice and delivery correct is one of the biggest challenges with those popular types of writing. Long-form content writing is a very different animal.

The purpose behind long-form content is to explain something to your audience. Are you going to pitch your products in it? Of course you are! Only and idiot would pass the opportunity to do that.

But one of the main reasons why your B2C or B2B blog exists is to create authority on your company’s core topics. So, to create authority, you must make dang sure that you are hitting all of the right notes. And I speak from experience; I have gotten comments on posts that I’ve written where the commenter called me on it, and I knew they were right. My thesis or conclusions were crap because I hadn’t tied it together with thorough research.

Define Your Research Goals

Okay, so first off, let’s talk a little bit about what long-form actually is. According to Hubspot, it is anything over 1,000 words. Now, in my opinion, that is still a pretty short piece, but that consensus seems to be around 1,000 words and up for long-form.

I’ve had clients who didn’t want anything under 2,000 words, which is excessive if you are just doing that for clicks because that opens up the door to way too much fluff, but hey, for what he pays, I wasn’t going to argue.

Sometimes, though, long-form content is much longer. White papers, large content guides, and content hubs can easily tip the scales at 5,000-10,000 words or longer.

Now, if you are writing 10,000 words and have no real research, you have ten thousand words of crap. How could you possibly make clear and concise conclusions with no research on something that long? There are printed books that only run 30,000-40,000 words.

So, if you are writing long pieces of content, you are basically staging an argument either in favor of what you are arguing or proving why a commonly held belief is wrong and your position is correct. Your goal is to support your hypothesis with high-quality research. This means using links from sites with high domain authority, easily recognizable sites with authority, etc.

Where Can You Find Credible Sources?

The internet is incredible. See, I did my undergrad in the early 2000s, finally finishing it in 2009. The internet obviously existed since I did about half of my Bachelor’s degree online, but it was a far cry from what we have at our disposal now.

Google (and other search engines) have changed our entire world. Without Google, frankly, I would not be doing what I do right now.

Google algorithmically provides really good sources right off the bat because their SERP protocols have advanced so far over the past decade to really sift out a lot of trash. Keyword stuffing used to be a big problem, but Google is very smart, and most of it never ends up high in the SERP anymore.

Caveat: I am not a Google fanboi, but they own over 90% of the search market, so if you are avoiding Google because of political reasons, you are losing. Now, if you work in a market like the 2A community where there is a history of search results being skewed, then yeah, you might target other search engines. But for everything non-political, Google is your #1 resource. Learn it, live it, because that is what your target audience uses.

If you need scholarly articles, don’t sleep on Google Scholar. Otherwise, a lot of it is intuition. For what I do (government contracts and contracting in the aerospace industry), I get used to the same websites with high levels of domain authority. For instance, I know that a boeing.com URL is a trusted source.

One of the biggest things you need to understand is who your competition is, though. You do not want to backlink to the competition! When I start working with a new client, I always get a list of their key competitors so I can make sure to avoid this happening (yes, I learned this the hard way).

Parting Thoughts

To be honest, this is probably going to morph into a content hub on its own. There is no way to go over my research process in 1,000 words or less. I know that sounds like a lot of words to a novice writer or an outsider, but it’s not. It amounts to about eight minutes of reading time.

My key takeaway is this: over-research is great. You don’t need to use all of your resources. But everyone will sniff out a fraud if you don’t include enough research to make your point and convince your audience. Also, familiarize yourself with how to recognize websites with high levels of domain authority, and don’t confuse your friends and foes.

Are you ready to take the next step with your long-form content or corporate blog? Is it not generating the kind of leads that you are looking for? Let’s talk!