Content Research - What Is It, And How To Do It

So far in the process, I will have done some keyword research to begin brainstorming a list of keywords, some competition research to narrow down that list into a smaller set of keywords I can compete on, and I will have organised this list of keywords into topic clusters so I know just how much content I need on what topics to build sites around these keywords. Next up - content research.

What is Content Research?

Imagine this scenario - you do a bunch of initial research as described above, get yourself a whole bunch of keywords, decide to set some of them up for later use and then get to work on the content creation and then you think, “damn, what the heck do I write about?”. You’ve registered a dozen domains, some of them targeting keywords in the same cluster and you just can’t come up with the content to put on the site, nevermind extra content which you’ll need later to build some backlinks (more on that later in the project.)

This is the situation I found myself in a year ago when I first started experimenting with niche sites and I did not want to make that mistake second time around. Content research is a process of deciding exactly what I am going to write before I even start the site. I do this right after I have sorted the keywords into topic clusters and before I register any domains because if I can’t come up with enough content then it’s a waste of time building the site.

This is not just topic research, I actually go as far as planning each blog post. It might be easier to give you a few examples, these are hypothetical site topics but they demonstrate the process:

• I might have a site about carp fishing locations. I would do some research and find as many places to fish carp as I could find, and see how much I could write about each one. If there is not much information I might need to mention 2 or 3 to write one article. Once I have found as many carp fishing locations as I can, I can calculate exactly how many articles I can write.
• I might have a site about money saving tips as I used as an example in the last post. I would spend a few hours reading blog posts and forums about money saving, frugality and so on and find as many individual tips as I could find. Each one could be written out more fully into its own article.
• Lets say I had an Internet marketing website (!) and I wanted to write about gaining backlinks (!) I would do the research first, come up with as many individual ideas as I could and then each one would be it’s own article. You never know, you might find something like this turning up on a blog near you soon :p
• I could have a site on some kind of cooking recipes such as vegetarian recipes for instance. This one is easy - one recipe per article.
• Assume I’m in a competitive market such as mortgages, and the keyword I am targeting is “discount mortgages for first time buyers”, I would go to mortgage comparison sites, find those providers that provide that kind of mortgage and then write an article on each individual lender. I would do something similar for any of those financial markets.

The essence of what I am trying to do here, is come up with something unique to write for each article. I don’t want to be writing the same article re-worded slightly differently a bunch of times. By making sure that each article is unique, it provides maximum value for the reader but more importantly, it allows me to pick up more long tail traffic in the search engines.

Storing Content Research Data For Later

It would be easy to get carried away when doing this kind of research and actually start writing it but that is not the point of the exercise. What I am really trying to do is conduct a feasability test. Is there enough ideas to write X number of unique articles for my sites? The number I need will depend on the number of keywords in my topic cluster. For each keyword I want 10 articles.

I use a document to store the ideas and I basically do the vast majority of my research using Google and then store links for later. For example, one of my niches is similar to the idea of the cooking recipe example I mentioned above. So I just created a list of all the recipes that I could find and links to those recipes on the Internet. When I come to writing the articles, I’ll go back to the links I saved and then write them up.

Educating Yourself In Your Niche

One thing I have seen a few people mention is to take content that exists already, such as articles submitted to EZine Articles, and then simply re-write those articles for your own site. I don’t really like this approach because you’ll find a lot of overlap between articles and of course many of them are just downright crap. What I prefer to do instead is if I am going into a niche that I don’t know much about (I knew very little about niches A & B before starting work on them), I’ll spend some time just reading and learning, just like I did when I started blogging.

I’ll read blogs, articles and anything else I can find and just learn and along the way I’ll be writing down ideas for specific topics that I can write about. That way, when I come to write my own stuff, I can do it in my own words which means that the end product will come out much better than if I had just tried to re-write somebody else’s article.

Where To Find Content

1) Your Keywords

Very often, I find that the keyword research itself will reveal many long tail phrases that indicate exactly what to write about. For example, I discovered that in niche B, location is significant and people were typing in keywords in the niche and extra words indicating a location, mainly US state names such as California or Texas for example. This allowed me to drill down into all the popular states and write articles specific to those states.

Note that the traffic levels are completely unimportant here. What I will often do is go to WordTracker’s free keyword tool and type in some keywords that I got from Market Samurai as that will bring me a big list of very long tail keywords. Many of them will have absolutely 0 traffic but that doesn’t matter because I’m just trying to find ideas to write about. I’ve got loads of ideas for my niches using this technique.

2) Google

The most obvious place to look is Google. I’ll simply type in my keywords into Google and look at the sites already ranking at the top and see what they have to say about the subject. What I often look for is competitors - other people’s niche sites on the same subject. Looking through their archives will often give me many ideas.

3) Blogs

Some topics are more blog-worthy than others but I usually manage to find a few blogs in the niches I look for. I will use Google Blog Search and Technorati to find blogs. Usually once you’ve found a few, you can find others by following the links in the first few blogs. Look for blogroll links, link posts etc. I’ll subscribe to the blogs I’ve found and then keep an eye on new posts.

4) Google Alerts

I will always set up a google alert for a few prominent keywords in my niche and I set this to send me information weekly so I don’t get bombarded with emails. Often the stuff in the alerts will lead me to competing niche sites, blogs and so on. I’ll usually do this as soon as I start investigating a niche as its a great way to get a feel for what information is out there and is being produced for that niche.

5) Article Directories

Okay when I say article directories, I mean Ezine Articles! There are others of course but EA is by far the biggest and for the vast majority of topics it will have more articles than any other directory. Now EA does have a search facility on its site but it is rather poor because it doesn’t return accurate results for keyword phrases containing more than one word.

I use the ‘Find Content’ module of Market Samurai to do this for me and I always ask for 50 results. I’ll start with a long tail keyword and if I don’t get enough results I’ll make it slightly broader. For example, if “vegetarian potato recipes” is not bringing me many results then I’ll try “vegetarian recipes”.

6) Forums

Again, some niches are more forum-friendly than others but most topics will have at least one or two main contenders. Finding them is easy, pick a prominent keyword in your niche and go to google and type in “keyword forum”. Simple as that. Forums are good in that there is a lot of information but the downside is that there is a lot of useless noise to wade through so I don’t use this option very much unless I’m really struggling for ideas.

In the next post I’ll give you some ideas on how you can write for ‘difficult’ keywords.

Stumble it!