How to research great content for your website - the secrets are revealed in this definitive guide.

How to research great content for your website

Why should you research content for your website?

The internet exists because people are constantly searching for information. The fact that you have a website means that you want to share information with other people.

This leaves you, the webmaster, with two major goals:

1. To supply the best information possible through your website.
2. To make sure the information within your website is easy to find through external links and search engines.

This is not as easy as it seems.

There are millions of websites on the internet, so you can be assured that there will be other people who want to share the same information as you.

To stand out from the crowd you have to supply the best information possible, which means that it is very important for you to:

• Find out what your competitors are up to.
• Write better content than your competitors.

How to carry out the research for your website content

There are a number of sources you can use to research content for your website, the most common being:

• Your own personal experience
• Other peoples personal experience
• Literature
• The internet

This list is intentionally written in this sequence, although literature and the internet are interchangeable (a vast amount of information previously only found in books is now available on the internet).

To gain credibility on the internet you need personal experience. You need to write from your own experiences, your own point of view.

Other people will soon realize if you are trying to use somebody elses words or trying to pass off somebody elses experiences as your own.

You will find that as you become more knowledgeable, from research using books, the internet and speaking to other people, you will start to form your own opinions, theories and ideas.

Your own personal experience will prove or disprove these opinions, ideas and theories.

When you base your writing on your own experience, you are speaking with an authority that is unique to you.

The sequence you should use to carry out research for your website content is:

1. Search the internet for all the information you can that is related to your website theme. Make a note of each website address (URL), you may need to refer back to them later.
2. Try to find as much information as possible from the books available to you.
3. Speak to as many people as you can who have some knowledge of your website theme.
4. Memorize as much of the information as possible, internalize it.
5. Use the information you have learned in your daily life, prove it or disprove it. Form your own opinion as to what works and what doesn't. Decide what is feasible and what isn't.
6. Put your experiences and opinions into writing. This information is now unique to you and the basis of your website content.

Important - To write with some authority, try to keep your theme as focused as possible and learn all that you need (not all that you can) to become competent.

On the other hand...

If you want to become an expert you had better be prepared to spend many years learning all that you can (not all that you need to).

When trying to figure out "how much is enough information?" there are two things to consider:

1. How much information is necessary to be able to answer with some authority?

   Think back on all the questions you had when you first became interested in the topic of your website,

Research and learn enough information to answer these questions (and any more that you can think of) and you will have learned enough to answer with some authority.

2. How much information is there in your competitors websites?

Your goal should be to have the best website on your topic or theme.

Use the search engines and research all of the terms you can think of that are related to your website theme.

The websites that come up in the results are your competitors. Go through each website carefully and find things that you can do better or answer more fully, look for things that are missing that you could include in your own website.

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