subject: Holding On to Your Research [print this page] lf you are an online freelancer, then most likely you spend a lot of time in your day doing research. For every article that you write, you may have to spend an hour or so doing research so that you can write about it from a knowledgeable point of view. Not having your facts straight can cost you your clients as they will no longer be able to trust your content that you are providing them with.
However, this is time that you do not get paid for, and thus it can seem like a waste of time, especially since you are only going to be paid for the article once. But this time does not have to be a waste as you can hold on to that research for future articles that you can write for yourself, or for another client.
Taking Notes
What I like to do is take notes and write things down in my own words so that I can reuse the information for later articles for myself. I like to organize all the information into groups like "What is it", "how will it benefit me", "how does it work", "how much will it cost me" and the list goes on. This helps me to retrieve my information for later articles without frustration.
Thorough Research
When doing your research for your articles, make sure to do a thorough research so that you will have lots of information to rewrite that content into many different articles. For example, if you gather lots of information surrounding a topic like heart disease, then you can use that information and write articles such as "What is Heart Disease", or "What Causes Heart Disease", and so on. The more information you gather, the more you can write.
Save Time
Gathering your information in this manner may be time consuming at first, but when you go to write your next set of articles from this information, you have it all at your fingertips, and you can just pump those articles out in a matter of minutes.
On top of that, having all your information in front of you helps you to organize your ideas, and helps you to figure out what your topics are that you can cover from this information. In addition, this can also help you to avoid writer's block which many writers face.
Therefore taking the initial time to neatly organize the information in your own words can save you a lot of time in the end.
