Work at Home Education Center

There are many ways to research information for a given project. You will likely find the internet the most often used research platform, but that doesn't mean offline sources aren't valuable either. Your local library or bookstore can offer a wealth of information for example.

But before you begin researching your next book, you really need to get a firm understanding of the topic at hand as well as the target market. Let's say you were hired to write a book about landscaping for beginners. Sometimes clients will actually provide you with chapter titles and thus your job is made so much easier. But other times they require your guidance and expert research skills to come up with not only the content but the structure as well.

Whether you're faced with having to identify the chapters (i.e. topics) of a new project or not, how do you get started?

First of all, you need to understand the target market. Discuss with your client their views on the target market and make sure you clearly understand where they're coming from. Think of what questions and/or problems those interested in landscaping might come up against. How does one get started? What kinds of tools or equipment are required? What kind of investment will be required? What resources are at hand when one runs into problems and requires help? These are all great questions that can be answered in your beginner's guide to landscaping.

You can also perform research online at Yahoo! Answers. Find out what people are asking questions about (within your niche). You can do the same thing with forums. Look on social networking sites like MySpace and join groups that are related to your niche.

Take advantage of the many tools that Google offers:

• For example there are groups (groups.google.com) you can search which operate a lot like a bulletin board.

• You can also try out Google Sets (labs.google.com/sets). Plug in some of the major keywords belonging to your niche, and Google Sets can return a set of related words. This can help with brainstorming further topics and/or ideas.

• Use Google Video and search for videos on your niche.

• Google now offers Google Blog Search - allowing you to specifically search blogs.

• When searching on Google, search a very generic word from your niche (i.e., landscaping) but put a tilde sign in front of the word (i.e., ~landscaping). The results which are returned have words bolded that are similar to your search term. This will help generate further ideas to write about.

A great technique to help gather research online is to use the Google Notebook (www.google.com/notebook). As you browse the web, you can easily copy and paste information to your notebook. It's a great way to collect information for a swipe file too.

Always gather research from numerous sources. Research does not mean plagiarism - so always make sure to put things into your own words.

Do not ever underestimate the time involved for researching a writing project. This is where most new writers fail in properly managing their time and clients' expectations. You need to keep tabs on how much time is put towards the research phase, so it can be factored into your total project estimate.