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When freelancing as a writer, it's more important than ever to learn how to reduce article writing research time so you can make money writing while reducing the amount of time spent in the pre-writing stages. Researching articles and topics is usually the most time-consuming aspect of freelance writing. This guide will give you some ideas for reducing your research times as well as making the most of the time you do spend on research.
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Introduction
You'll hear it said over and over, "Write what you know!" which is great, if you know a lot of things. When you don't automatically know a lot of things, the only way you can write what you know then is to research something and learn it. The problem with research is that it can be very time consuming, and if you're a freelance writer or even a staff writer on a deadline, time is absolutely precious. Most of your time has to be spent writing, not researching, right?Yes, this is true, but there is a way to maximize your research time, and get more out of the time you spend learning about a new topic. The steps below will help you do both: get more out of your research time and reduce your research time.
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Randy Pausch - Time Management
Randy Pausch was a professor for Carnegie Mellon University, before he died from pancreatic cancer. He became an overnight celebrity w ... read moreRandy Pausch was a professor for Carnegie Mellon University, before he died from pancreatic cancer. He became an overnight celebrity when he gave his now famous Last Lecture speech, and received over 10 million views on YouTube. He was a dynamic public speaker, and he was exceptional at portraying how to live life to the fullest and succeed but fulfilling your childhood dreams.
In this video, he discusses time management, and while it's not directly related to researching article topics, better time management skills are crucial for freelance independent contractors in any field.
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Step 1: Know Your Topic
When you're freelance writing and you have to research a topic to write about it, you need to already know what you are going to write about. Every article topic can have many different angles you can take to approach the writing, but if you research every angle, you'll never get any writing completed. It's best to have at least a cursory idea of what your article topic is before you dive into the research.While researching, avoid getting caught up in reading about other angles on your topic. Narrow your focus to researching only the niche area of your topic that you selected.
For example, if you are writing about household budgeting for a family, you might want to focus your topic on researching only about budgeting food expenses for a family. Maybe you'll decide to tackle only medical expense budgeting. If you pick food budgeting, there's no need to research about budgeting for medical bills, and vice versa.
Keep your research as narrow on you topic as your writing will be and you'll reduce your research time by not reading about things you won't use in your writing.
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Step 2: Research Once, Write a Lot
While you are researching your narrowly focused niche topic for your article, see if you can't find other articles you can write from the research you are doing. If you're writing about the first airplane ever invented, you might get a lot of information about the inventors of that airplane. Why not use that information to write a second article that is a biography about them?Every topic you might choose to write about can have many different angles. When you're researching, make notes, and jot down ideas for off-shoot articles that can use the same research you already had to spend time doing for the one article. Once you get into this habit, you might find that you can spend the same amount of time researching a topic as you always have, but you'll write three or four times as many articles for the same amount of research time!
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Step 3: Take Detailed Notes
When you're reading and studying information about your article's subject, you might run across snippets of interest for future article. Take detailed notes when you find these things, but move on and finish researching your topic for the one article you're writing.It's easy to get sidetracked while researching articles for a particular topic and read everything but what you needed to write the article. If you force yourself to stay on topic but take detailed notes including book titles, page numbers, link URLs and websites to go back to when you're finished writing the first article, you'll have more time and write better articles than if you try to research multiple topics at one time.
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Step 4: Write Multiple Articles on the Same Topic
If you have researched a topic well, you should be able to write multiple articles on the same topic. Chances are, as a freelance writer or a web copywriter, you will submit writing to multiple websites, publications and publishers. Each will want something different on a popular topic, and if you write multiple articles on the same subject, you cut down your research time and multiply your writing time exponentially. -
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