10 Tools to Speed Up Research for Writing Blog Posts

Depending on your skills, your knowledge, and the topics you choose, writing blog posts can be anything from a quick exploration of a topic to a massive slog of research. Most blog posts aren’t quite as deeply involved as term papers or PhD theses, but sometimes, it sure can feel that way.

Fortunately, there are a lot of different ways to speed up the process of blogging. I wanted to talk today about some of the tools I use to speed up the research process when I’m writing a blog post.

To put things into perspective, one of my typical blog posts – around 2,000 words of content on a given subject – tends to take around 2-3 hours to research and write. Maybe three if it’s a particularly complex topic or a thin topic that I have to figure out how to expand. This varies based on all sorts of things, of course. I’ve been doing this for well over a decade at this point, and I wasn’t this fast back when I started. It can take longer if I’m distracted, or having a bad day, or just don’t really know anything about the topic.

But, you know, I’ve talked to fellow bloggers and had them wonder how I get my posts done in less than six hours, so I know I’m doing something right. Of course, the whole post isn’t done in just an hour. I still do editing passes, a run through something like Clearscope, optimize keywords, find and inject more relevant links, have images created and add them, do all the metadata, and all of that stuff. The full process is definitely lengthier. But, the basic research and writing don’t take all that long.

So, this list is ten tools I’ve used in my workflow to speed up research so I know what I need to know to write a post. Bear in mind that none of these are writing tools; I’m not using ChatGPT to vomit up an outline to blindly fill in or anything like that. I think having an actual mind with critical thinking and logical flow behind it is important for a good blog post. I don’t mind using the occasional AI tool when it’s useful, but this is not a post about that.

Read on to discover my top ten list!

1: Personal Behaviors and Habits

Alright, I’m kind of cheating a little bit by putting this at the top, but I need to say this upfront: part of how I’m so fast at researching and drafting blog posts is practice and the habits I’ve built up over a decade of writing over a million words of blog posts per year.

Learn to estimate how much information you need to write a topic. One of the most difficult challenges with writing blog posts is figuring out how much you need to know about a topic to write about it with some level of authority. This varies, not just between industries, but between topics. Familiarity with a topic also helps; it takes me longer to write content for new clients whose topics I haven’t looked into before than it does something like marketing, where I’ve been working in the field for 15 years.

This can also vary depending on what kind of blog post you’re writing. A list can be easier to write with less overall information because you only need surface-level details for each list item. Meanwhile, a deep dive into a specific topic requires more knowledge.

Learning how much research you need to do to be able to write a post and when to stop researching and get to work is one of the most important skills I picked up over time.

Learn how to write a draft without worrying about polish. Another skill that can take a lot of time to develop is just… writing. Many people have an urge to make what they write perfect. They rephrase, rewrite, reorganize, and end up spending hours on half a page of content.

In the end, if you can force yourself to just write until you have the bulk of what you want to say down on the page, you’ll be in a better place. You can always add, edit, remove, tweak, and fix issues with what you write down the road, but if you get stalled out in the act of writing, you’ll be stuck.

Learn to skip tricky sections if they hold you up. I tend to write linearly these days and have a pretty good idea of how to outline something that avoids the sections that would stall me out, but until you develop that skill, realize that it’s fine to jump around. If writing a good intro is holding you back, skip the intro and write it later. I’ll even sometimes write out an outline, start going through it, realize a section doesn’t fit, and I can’t figure out how to make it work, so I just delete it and move on. Again, the primary goal is words on a page, not perfection out of the gate.

Consider using timers to suit your habits. The one “tool” in the habits section is timers. A lot of people have trouble concentrating for a long time on something, but if you use timers and take breaks, you can work more effectively. The Pomodoro Technique is the archetypal version of this concept. I don’t tend to use actual timers anymore, but I also don’t kick myself if every ~30 minutes, I end up spending a few minutes checking my phone or email.

Become familiar with your writing platform of choice. Different people like different writing tools. Some write directly in WordPress, some use Google Docs, some use LibreOffice, some use Microsoft Word, and some even use more exotic things like Scrivener. Whatever you use, learn its features and how to use them faster. The less time you spend hunting for options, the better off you’ll be.

Scrivener is an interesting option, by the way. It’s primarily meant for fiction writers, so it has a lot of features for things like outline management, chapter management, and the like. But one useful feature is the ability to keep snippets and research materials all in one place and even interlink them with your text for consistency along the way. I think it’s probably overkill for blog posts, but some people might find it helpful.

And, of course, just practice. The longer you work in a career, the better you’ll get at it and the faster you’ll be. No amount of tool usage can replace experience, no matter how many billions a tech bro invests in trying to do so.

2: Perplexity

Perplexity is an AI tool and the only one I’m including on this list. It’s a lot like something like ChatGPT but aimed at cited research rather than LLM output, which makes it infinitely more reliable.

Basically you ask it a question, and it gives you answers. The answers it gives you come with citations, and it gets its information essentially by summarizing the top search results for your question. It’s kind of like just speeding up the “search Google and read the results” process you’re going to be doing anyway.

It’s not always fully accurate, especially with topics where Google’s keyword assumptions and language processing can get things wrong, though. For example, I put in today’s topic, and it gave me a bunch of AI writing tools and very little that is helpful for research, which is the core of the topic.

Still – it’s free, and it can give you a bunch of ideas as a jumping-off point, so it can cut a good chunk off of your research time by giving you initial direction.

3: Reddit

Reddit is Reddit. We all know it, we all hate it and love it in equal measure.

I find that, for many topics, a basic Google search gives you some perspective and a Reddit search for the topic will either give you a ton of good information or essentially nothing of value. It’s always one or the other and never anything in between.

You can go to Reddit yourself, find a relevant sub, and post asking about your topic to get information directly. That doesn’t speed up research, though, so I don’t bother with it unless I’m intentionally seeking out quotes or digging into a topic with almost no coverage online.

4: Mendeley

Mendeley is an interesting app. It’s basically a search engine, but it searches through things like scientific journals, published papers, and other scholarly research. You can use it on the web or download it, and if you download it, you can store papers and other research for future reference.

This is a very hit-or-miss tool, and it depends entirely on the topics you’re researching. For example, I’ve written a few posts recently about website tracking cookies and privacy compliance. A search for that topic in Mendeley brings up some interesting scholarly research about user perception, content moderation, surveillance, and censorship, but in practical terms that only helped me with about two paragraphs across two large blog posts.

But on the other hand, I have clients in the medical field, so I’m often diving deep into the National Institute of Health and various medical publications. Mendeley is an incredibly good search engine for that because you can filter by document type, source, or even publication year. Like I said, it’s pretty hit or miss.

5: Clearscope

I’m using Clearscope here as a shorthand for that entire style of content improvement app, including others like MarketMuse. Personally I don’t use them much in research. For me, they’re more of a post-draft improvement tool to help with adding keywords and the like.

But you could use them to help with research if you wanted. It’s especially helpful if you’re working on a post, but you’re running out of ideas, and it’s coming in too short. These tools help give you keyword ideas, and sometimes, those keyword ideas are tertiary to your primary topic and can give you ideas to spin off another section of a post.

I’ve done this a few times, and it’s admittedly effective; it’s just not part of my standard workflow.

6: Autocorrect

Over the years, one of the best tools I’ve found for micro-improvements in writing is autocorrect.

I type relatively quickly, but I also make mistakes fairly frequently because of how fast I type and the way I type. Now, one option is to just ignore them and go back to fix them later, but that’s time-consuming. Stopping and fixing them as I write works, but it’s slow and can derail a train of thought.

Instead you should just use autocorrect. MS Word’s autocorrect is fairly powerful, Google Docs can work but isn’t case-sensitive, and other programs have their own pros and cons.

I have a couple of tips for autocorrect to make it more worthwhile, too.

• If you find yourself making a typo repeatedly, set up a special rule for it. I have a few dozen of these that never appear in my writing anymore because of this.
• Use autocorrect for long phrases you don’t want to type over and over. For example, I wrote a bunch of posts about user-generated content a while back, and I was tired of typing it repeatedly, so I made “##UGC” autocorrect to it. It’s kind of like digital shorthand once you get used to it.
• Use autocorrect for brand and acronym capitalization. It’s kind of minor, but knowing whether it’s Semrush or SEMRush and fixing it can be a delay, so set up a rule to have it auto-fix and let it be.

Remember – these tools can be customized to your needs, so use them however you find most useful.

7: Pocket

Pocket is a fairly useful app (and it’s built into Firefox by default now) that allows you to just save stuff you want to keep around. Whether it’s a link, a video, a blog post, just a paragraph of text, or whatever, you can put it in your pocket (get it) and go dig through it later.

This can be useful in a few ways. For one, if you’re just browsing the internet casually and see something that gives you an idea for a blog post, you can save it for later. The same goes for things that are just interesting, and you want to read, of course.

Another is that when you do your research, instead of having 30 different browser tabs open while you juggle to figure out which bits of what you want to keep in mind, you can just save snippets to pocket and browse them all in one place.

There are a bunch of different ways to do this, including other apps (like Instapaper) or even just copying and pasting relevant stuff into another document and using that as a reference, so find whatever works for you.

8: Ahrefs

Ahrefs has a lot of value for a lot of different reasons. One of them is for competitive research. Generally, the best resource when you’re looking into a topic is the content produced by other people who have already been down that road before you. Ahrefs can make it easy to browse and figure out what your competition is and what they’re saying.

Honestly I also just love recommending Ahrefs; they’re so good at everything they do that I don’t think I could effectively work without them at this point.

9: Blog Post Templates

For this one, I don’t mean actual templates so much as conceptual templates. The form a blog post takes is going to inform what kind of research you need to do and whether it’s surface-level or deep-dive, opinionated or factual, cited or not. Building up that mental library of templates helps a lot.

I say mental library because that’s more or less how I think of it at this point, but if you need to, you can build actual templates. They don’t need to be a lot – even just a document with an intro space, an outro space, and a bunch of numbers for a listicle can be fine – as long as they help you speed up your work process.

10: Topicfinder

Most of the lists I produce here on this site have Topicfinder on them somewhere, but this one is especially close to home.

Why? I built Topicfinder from the ground up specifically to help me with topic research. I mean, it’s a custom-made platform designed to help me do basic topic research and ideation for dozens of marketing clients. It’s public in the first place because I thought it was valuable enough that other people would like it too, so I refined it to make it acceptable for public use, and here we are.

Give it a try; I bet you can find some value out of it right away.

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