Improving Your Research Skills Online
It doesn’t matter if you’re a journalist, podcaster, blogging about metal roof CT or whatnot. What matters most is that you are aware and knowledgeable of using the internet for doing extensive research on the topic you are working on. Online research is capable of giving credence to your work and expand your horizon while boosting your probabilities of success.
Besides, doing proper research gives you a backup to your listeners or readers that you’re not just making things up in your content. With this in play, how would you use the internet to thoroughly do your research?
Internet for Research Purposes
Doing online research is more than just your casual web browsing and Googling. Literally today, anyone can do a quick Google search but only few will be able to draw the most relevant and best results. If you really want to do a job well done with your research, there are key skills you need to learn.
What is the Topic of Your Research?
Basically, there are two kinds of research that can be done and these are hard and soft research. In the former, it is used in searching for factual, objective and scientific topics in which numbers, statistics as well as extensive evidence is needed. Soft research though is only for opinion-based topics like trending topics and so on.
Being able to know what kind of research you exactly do in advance allows you in narrowing where you should be looking for information.
Create a List of Keywords that’ll be Used
Think of your topics and create ways of how you can express the same idea in 5 words or less. For instance, if you’re doing research about roofing contractors, that can be the obvious keyword for it. But you must not stop there. You need to expand it so you can get more info about what you are looking for. Perhaps, you can use relevant keywords like roofing contractors near me, how to hire roofing contractors, roofing reviews and so forth.
Use Specialized Search Engines
Google might be dominating the search engine scene but it isn’t the only search engine available. There are times that you are going to get better and more refined results by using specialized search engines.