How to Properly Research Subject Matter for Online Articles

Readers want to know where the writer got the information from and how reliable it is. If a source is not reliable or cannot be traced back to reliable source, the information is inconclusive.

Choose a subject to write about. If given a subject to write about, begin researching the subject by visiting Google.com. Google is an excellent search tool for writers to put articles together. I used to write a lot of long health articles and found a method for coming up with subject matter regarding each health-related (or dental) subject that I was writing about. I had to list eight citations for an 800 word medical or dental article. The citations had to be reputable and different and I had to cite where I got the information from within the website. To begin those more in-depth articles, I began researching them backwards. I found that if I wrote the article and then added the citations, it seemed to take me a long time to write them, but if I found the information I wanted to write about and listed the citations at the end in the proper format first, I had a reference to go off of in order to write the article.

Finding references/citations can be difficult, but if you know how to do it, Google can make it pretty easy. I will use the medical and dental articles as an example throughout this article, but you can utilize this method for a shorter or less complicated article, if you like. Since I needed eight references and I needed to write a minimum of 800 words, I broke the article down into four sections, two references or citations per section to support the material. First I decided on my four subjects/headers and I listed them in the article body in bold after the title. Then I found my citations (remember, two for each article header) and I listed each citation in a numbered list in the proper format that my client asked for, saving as I went in case my computer crashed and I had to restart it. After I gathered all eight citations, I simply logged into each website and wrote a 100 word paragraph based on the information I found, so that each header was followed by two paragraphs with 100 words each, for a total of 200 words per section. When I was done, I had an 800 + word article to turn in that was already in the proper format.

Choosing topics to write about is the next trick. If you already have a subject, go to Google and type in the subject. Keep in mind that you may have to type it in several different ways before finding enough information. I'll use the subject of menopause. If you go the main page on Google and type in menopause, a pull-down menu of choices should pop up. I see there are choices for menopause symptoms, menopause age, menopause weight gain, menopause hot flashes, menopause depression and menopause diet. Just from looking at these subjects, I see many topics I can write about in a menopause article. If I want to write several articles about menopause, I might choose some of these main topics as the subject matter for several different articles. For example, instead of doing a general article about all subjects, I might do an article on menopause and age, one on symptoms, one on menopause and depression and so forth. Choose a subject and do a search on it. If I choose "menopause and depression" and do a search on this subject in Google, I see a bunch of web pages. Scroll to the bottom of the page. Most times there will be additional links to other related search subjects, so if I'm doing an article about depression and menopause, I see that I can use "male menopause depression", "early menopause depression", and "menopause and anxiety" as my topic headers. I can now click on each of these links at the bottom to find information to support my article.