Have you ever dreamt of the freedom provided by your own online business? If yes, have you ever felt the disappointment of discovering that running an online business may sometimes be worse that the regular 8-5 day job? If you develop content sites in many niche markets, that's more than likely.
If you own a network of white-hat websites in different niches, you invariably face the dilemma of generating content. There are many options, the most popular ones being as follows:
- You can outsource content generation (good, but costly),
- You can use PLR content after rewriting it (mixed results),
- You can write your own articles (if you're not writing about your passion, it quickly gets boring and mundane).
The first two are great, but for many, especially in the early stages of building their online empires, the third option is the only way to go. However, if you just try to follow the money, you almost always encounter the second problem - writing about topics that you're not expert in is difficult and time-consuming.
I am going to offer you some tips here to speed up that process significantly, making it as easy and painless as possible to write new, high-quality content. And you will not have to spend a dime - all required tools are free!
My goal is to show you how to optimize the research stage to the level where you can have a full article (ready for further rewriting) in a matter of minutes, not hours.
Ok, let's get straight into the action, shall we?
1) Optimize your search for content sources
When I discovered this single idea, it really was a great productivity boost.
Our goal here is to make sure that relevant content that we can use (after rewriting) in our articles is available in the very first results of our query in the search engine. I mean nice, full sentences of high quality. We do not want results from ebay, priceline and the likes, which tend to dominate the results in case of many queries.
There are two methods that I like here:
- Google Custom Search Engine
This is a fantastic service from Google. It allows you to define your own search engine, with all the power of Google, but limited only to a nicely defined set of websites that you want to search for content. You can create a separate search engine for each of your niches, hand-picking your best sources. This will make your further research at least two times more efficient, so it's well worth the trouble.
While defining your search engines, you can often look for lists of top sites in your niche - that are such rankings for many different industries.
As an example, I can share with you my two custom search engines. The first one searches the best (strongest) article directories - it's a perfect search engine for general research in many niches. I like it a lot.
The second search engine searches the best SEO and SEM-related blogs. It's useful when I am researching some ideas for this site.
Go now and define your own custom search engines - you will really like the results if you have the right list of source websites.
- Yahoo Mindset
This is a beta service by Yahoo that's extremely useful to quickly filter out the unwanted commercial content and find the juicy text pieces that you can include in your research.
How it works? After you enter your query and the results are displayed, you can use a special slider to show the intention of your query - whether you're more in the shopping mode or more in the research mode. Depending on how you move the slider, you will get different results. When I'm researching for articles, I usually move the slider to the very end of the scale on the right side. See the two screenshots below and compare results for "visit Spain":
In the research mode, you get a lot of information about Spain itself, in the shopping mode, you get links to hotel bookings, etc.
2) Save yourself many clicks when copying content
This may seem as a very simple and little trick, but you will see its full power when combined with tip no. 3.
I assume that you're using Firefox (if not, you should really consider a switch). There's a great extension called Auto Copy. After installing this extension, simply selecting a piece of text copies it into the clipboard. No need for Ctrl-C shortcut or using the context menu.
But wouldn't you still need to paste that text somewhere after each selection?
Well, that's where trick no. 3 comes handy.
3) Get the most powerful clipboard manager on the Earth (and yes, it's free)
ClipMagic is one of my recent discoveries, and I am absolutely in love with this extremely powerful clipboard manager. It used to be a for-fee software, but has recently turned into freeware.
The feature set it offers goes well beyond what we need for our research.
The most important point is that it will hold as many clipboard entries as you wish. No need to paste the clipboard somewhere each time you copy a new piece of text.
Each piece will be stored in ClipMagic as a separate entry. What's really cool is that the program associates some meta-data with each clip. For example, you can instantly check the source page of each clip.
After you're done, you can export all your clips as a single file or merge all of them and copy to clipboard as a simple text.
Can you see where I am heading? To the very optimized research workflow!
4) Where it all comes together - your optimized article writing workflow
If I'm writing on a topic I know little about, my current workflow is as follows:
- I do my keyword research to determine the most important keywords to target.
- Then, I perform my search, first using the primary keyword / phrase, using the custom search engines mentioned above
- I open all results that seem to be of interest in separate tabs.
- I quickly scan articles to evaluate if they are of any interest to me. I often use the search term highlighting feature from Google Toolbar to quickly locate the most relevant sections of articles.
- If I find any sentences that I like, I simply select them. They get automatically added to ClipMagic.
- I try to make sure that I follow a logical path, i.e. starting with introduction, through main points, to the conclusion. This ensures that I have less content reorganization later on.
I may repeat the above with more refined keywords.
When I am done, I simply merge all clipped items and paste them into any editor.
What I have is a very solid base for my own articles. Obviously, it would be a very bad idea to use that content without any rewriting! But rewriting is so much easier than writing from scratch on a subject that I am not expert in (actually, I tend to outsource rewriting - it's cheaper than outsourcing writing articles from scratch).
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