Article Ghost Writer Tips – How To Do Research Quickly

ou can write web content quickly and still deliver quality. It’s all about streamlining your writing method. I know that research is one area where lots of writers waste a lot of time. Especially when you’re new at doing online writing jobs, the research portion of it takes forever.
I’ve gotten it down to a science and one way I’ve done that is by planning ahead. I used to start with each article, trying to think of a topic first, and then doing research to write an outline. Now, I do much more of the research ahead of time so that I only need to research specific facts during the writing process.
When I get a new order for content, I spend some time surfing around on the web and get a topic for each article. At that moment, I try to think of 3 or 4 points to cover. For example, if I’m writing on the topic of “brain training,” I may decide to cover these areas:
How does brain training help your brain function?
What kinds of brain training things can you do for free by yourself?
Where you can find brain training stuff online?
Then, when I’m actually writing the article, I’ll research each of these topics. This is what’s called “targeted research.” It’s much easier for finding good information than just blindly surfing around general websites that you find under the keyword “brain training.”
Doing it this way also makes your article more original. After all, you thought of the direction you want the article to take yourself rather than just copying something that’s already been written. If you do this bit of planning ahead of time, it cuts down considerably on your research time.
Even though you’ve thought out the direction of your article ahead of time, be flexible. If you start doing your research and you find something else to cover in the article, or if you find that one of your points is really hard to find info on, change it to something else. It doesn’t matter what points you use as long as you have an article that fits together logically and sticks to topic.
Another thing to do is to save websites that have helpful information. If I’m doing a job on one topic, I’ll bookmark some sites that offer good, reliable information on that topic. Topic-specific forums and answer sites are great for this. You might also want to bookmark search engines for forums, articles and other information you’ll use. Forums are great for thinking of topics. Again, the whole key is that you don’t have to start researching from zero every time, typing your keyword into Google to look for information (which will turn up lots more junk than relevant info probably).
Finally, here’s something extremely important. Sometimes when you’re researching, you’re flying along and finding just what you need. Sometimes, you’re just randomly surfing around and basically turning up nothing useful. It’s easy to spin your wheels doing research, and it’s important to understand when you’re doing this and stop it. This is when you need to take a break or do something else!
I think that lots of writers who struggle with this probably don’t know when they’re not being productive. Endless random researching doesn’t get you anywhere. As I said before, the more targeted your research is, the quicker you’ll turn up the key facts you need to make your content really shine.
Ultimately, try different things and tweak accordingly. If one method speeds up the process, stick with it. I always find myself making little changes here and there if they save me some time. I even used to time myself to see how long it took to research each article, and then I tried to beat my score (all while still trying to find the right info!). It sounds weird probably, but it helped me to notice where in the writing process I was taking too long. Remember: if you’re an article ghost writer, time IS money. If you can speed up your online writing jobs, you can write web content for more money.