If you want to succeed in any given niche, then you need to offer something different that the competition isn’t already offering. This is how you stand out as different and memorable and this is how you make links ‘clickable’ and sharable.
But coming up with new content is hard. Especially in a crowded niche where there are thousands of new articles published every day!
Moreover, you’re going to have to do your research if you want to appear accurate, reliable and trustworthy too. So how do you go about mastering your research skills so that you can really stand out? You read on, that’s how!
Your Inspiration
The more information you take in, the more inspiration you put out. Without meaning to get too philosophical here, most psychologists now agree that there’s no such thing as a truly ‘original’ idea. Instead, our ideas are created when we combine different ideas we already had.
So the more information you are taking in on a regular basis, the more bits of data you will have available to recombine into something brand new.
And this shouldn’t just mean reading on the topics that you’re writing about either. Reading on different topics is also important as this way you can bring related knowledge in from other fields or combine subjects in order to come up with something completely new.
What’s more, reading other blogs and websites can give you ideas for structuring articles or spinning them that you can apply to your own work in new ways. Like that article on how to dress like a bodybuilder? How about taking it and applying it to your own niche for an article on ‘how to dress like an entrepreneur’?
Great places to get ideas and material then include:
- Websites
- Blogs
- Magazines
- Books
- TV
Subscribe to some RSS feeds and keep reading!
Looking for News
It’s also important to try and stay up-to-date by following the latest news and developments. This sometimes means going straight to the source, which can mean reading journal studies (look for them on Google Scholar) or looking at press releases (you can find sites that collect and publish these).
Taking it Further
The truly unique and interesting stuff though comes when you start going deeper and really researching into your topic. Often this begins with asking the right questions. When you next read an article telling you about a new discovery for instance, ask why that’s true. Why does that new workout routine work so well? And what if you were to turn it up a notch or introduce a new element?
