How to Develop a Research Plan For Your Blog Posts

Remember, your blog must be authoritative in your area of expertise. You can gain authority on the web by earning links, yes, but you won’t earn any links if your content stinks. Your content won’t stink if you’re doing adequate research. Research is about creating new value for readers.

If you can take the vast amount of knowledge out there and distill it into manageable chunks that your readers can digest, you will be able to earn consistent visitors over the long life of your site.

Now, if you’re convinced that research is important, how do you start?

You should start by picking your sources. These are the primary repositories from which you will extract valuable data.

Where do you get most of your ideas?

• Books?
• Magazines?
• Academic journals?
• Personal interviews?
• Web articles?

This will depend greatly on the kind of information you’re collecting for your readers.

For example, if you’re a bookstore writing a blog about books, then your primary research sources will be books.

If you have a science-based information blog, you will probably get a great deal from a combination of books and academic journals. Science articles need to be precise and rigorously cited, so if you can link your insights to peer-reviewed research, your readers will trust you and probably subscribe to you.

If you’re writing a business blog, you will surely get a lot of blog topics out of business books. But you should also consider interviewing other business people in your area. Their unique insights will surely make for interesting blog material.

When you were writing essays in school, you may remember having to create thesis statements.

Thesis statements were helpful because they gave you a guide for conducting your research. You had a central premise and an argument you were trying to support through your research.

Blogs don’t have a thesis statement. So what can you use instead?

Whether you’re trying to sell a product, spread information, or communicate authority, you will likely come back to the same topics again and again.

So you’d be wise to make a short list of two or three grand topics and then create child topics, if necessary.

This way, as you’re perusing through your various research sources, you’ll quickly know (and more quickly as you get practice) which articles or book chapters you need to read and which you can ignore.

Once you’ve identified resources and topics, the fun part begins. Start diving into your research sources and divide the information among your topic headings.

Make sure to notate the sources of all your information, so you can link back to them or offer a citation.

Whether you’ve been blogging for a while or are just starting out, it’s easy to get your blog going with BoldGrid.

You can install your Blog during the initial Inspirations process, or you can add it later.

If you have any trouble getting the blog to integrate, feel free to drop a questions or comments anytime.