How Do You Do Research for Your Content?

Every Friday, we’re answering your questions about business, startups, customer success and more.

Happy Friday!

This week’s question comes from Jarratt Isted, who asks:

There are two types of research we do for our content:

1. Research to better understand what readers are interested in learning about or solving. This is important because it helps us make our content more useful.
2. Research to have corroborating data that makes our posts richer and more effective. This is important because it helps us get more people to take action from our content (e.g., you may believe me when I say something, but you’ll believe me a lot more if I have peer-reviewed research to back it up).

For the first kind of research, we use a combination of:

• Parsing our blog comments, emails and Tweets for questions
• Keyword research using Keyword Planner and Keyword Tool
• Reading other blogs that have covered the issue (and especially the comments)

For the second, we use:

• Books
• Statista
• Google (as well as Google Scholar and Google Books)

Much of the research for a given post is done well before we start writing it. That’s because of our Trello system for filing away anything we find that might be useful for future content.