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So What? How To Research Efficiently

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

airs every Thursday at 1 pm EST.

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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on how to research efficiently. We walk through conducting research for your content, how to determine credible sources, and putting your research to work. Catch the replay here:

So What? How To Research Efficiently

 

In this episode you’ll learn: 

  • How to conduct research for content marketing purposes
  • How to identify credible sources
  • How to synthesize data into usable points of view

Upcoming Episodes:

  • Auditing Tag Manager – 6/17/2021
  • Auditing your content – 6/24/2021

 

Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/insights/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/

AI-Generated Transcript:

Unknown Speaker 0:34
Well, Hey, everyone. For those of you keeping track Happy Thursday it is again Thursday. Welcome to the marketing analytics and insights live show. I’m Katie joined by John Chris is off doing a panel today,

Unknown Speaker 0:49
John and I are going to cover how to research efficiently. And so this topic came up when I was talking with one of our clients. And she had mentioned that a lot of times, her clients will assign a topic that the team has to write a blog post about. And a lot of times, it’s something that they don’t necessarily know that much about. And so what happens is there’s this rush to get things done, there’s a lack of research, and then there’s just a lack of general understanding about the topic in general. So things are kind of pieced together, copied and pasted. And the clients not happy. So what John and i want to do today was sort of run through the basics of researching a topic you don’t really know that much about if you’re asked to write about it, or even just in general, if it’s something that you want to know about. So, John, today, we are going to talk through, you know, figuring out how to know if what the heck you’re looking at is credible. Some of the different ways to determine that, and then what to do with all of that information in order to write a credible blog post. So should we just sort of kick it off the top with the basics of all basics of research? Yeah, definitely. I’d like to hear kind of some of the tacks you take because this is a big topic, we see so much content out there. That’s just second rate, or is just echo chamber stuff. So yeah, I’m excited to dig in. So I was I was only half joking with my client when I was talking with her about this. But I asked her I’m like, do they know that step number one is to Google the topic and see what comes up. And so that is step number one is to figure out who’s been writing about it, what’s been written about it, but that can sort of bring you down this rabbit hole of how do I know if what I’m looking at is, you know, sponsored content, if it’s biased in a certain way to make me believe something if it’s purely just advertising? And so, believe it or not, you can even Google for things like how do I know if a source is credible. And there’s some basic frameworks and steps that you can take to determine

Unknown Speaker 2:54
whether or not a source is credible. Number one, is, when was the last time that the article was updated? So if you’re so let’s say for example, John, you are trying to figure out how to start a podcast. If you Google, how do I start a podcast, and all of the information that comes up is a couple of years old, it’s probably not the latest and greatest because you as someone who’s really involved in podcasting knows that the way in which you get the information out there or the equipment or you know, however, you know, podcasts are done, the magic of podcast has probably changed in the past few years. Is that an accurate statement? Yeah, definitely. And you know, one thing with Google searches, you can do the Advanced Search always taken just search for the past year or less, you know, month, because you’ll see that with a lot of topics, you know, you pull it up, and you’ll get a bunch of articles from 2016. And, you know, from just because they’re the most popular over time, but yeah, you always want to get the most current stuff, especially when you’re doing tech stuff. You know, if you’re quoting something from three years ago, you probably doesn’t even work anymore.

Unknown Speaker 4:00
I think that, you know, that actually moves nicely into the next point in terms of, you know, checking the accuracy of the information is looking at the information itself. Is it from a business? Is it somebody has personal page? Is it an advocacy organization? Is it an educational like a.edu or a.gov or a dotnet? And so,

Unknown Speaker 4:24
trying to do sort of like sort through who’s writing it, what agenda did they have when they’re writing it? Or is it something like NPR that tries their best to be completely unbiased and just present the facts? Or is it other news outlets or is even a business like a Trust Insights that might be doing their best to provide unbiased information, but ultimately, at the end of the day, we want you to keep coming back to us and determining that were the experts and hiring us for things, you know, so it really depends on what it is that you’re trying to get out.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
The information that you’re googling that you’re searching for, I guess googling isn’t necessarily the right term. It’s Google has become sort of the noun, verb, adverb adjective for all things. But really what you’re doing is you’re doing your research.

Unknown Speaker 5:16
Yeah. And so from Google, what are the kind of steps you go from there? I mean, what what do you usually dig in? After that, you’ve got your first wave of search, what happens next? So I’m actually going to share my screen. Let me make sure I share the correct screen.

Unknown Speaker 5:33
So this is my screen. Can you see that John? Yeah, we’re good. I’m not as technically savvy as Chris is when it comes to sharing my screen, live. So let’s say how to start a podcast is what we’re looking for.

Unknown Speaker 5:51
And so you can see that there are the, you know, sponsored posts. So it’s not to say that those posts wouldn’t necessarily have the best information, but people are paying to make sure that you see that information first. So you can start to see, you know, how to start a podcast a complete step by step tutorial. And then you can dig in deeper with more specifics. But so John, you were saying that there are advanced ways to be searching. So Advanced Search.

Unknown Speaker 6:23
And so this might be a really good place to start narrowing down what it is you’re searching for. So how to start a podcast in 2021.

Unknown Speaker 6:34
So you want to find pages you want to find, you know, the equipment.

Unknown Speaker 6:39
If I could spell that’s part of the problem is, I can’t spell?

Unknown Speaker 6:43
And none of these words, yes, because I don’t plan on talking to anyone except for myself. You know, you want to, you know, have it in probably anyway, this is sort of where you were talking about John, last update, probably within, let’s say, the past month. Um, so let’s just sort of see what happens when we do that.

Unknown Speaker 7:06
So yeah, that’s interesting, it kills the ads, right? There isn’t that it kills the ads, it’s very different information.

Unknown Speaker 7:13
And so you can see this article. And again, I don’t know much about any of these sources. And that will sort of be stuck to John, but you’ll cover is how to start a podcast in 2021, which is exactly what I was looking for. So let’s see.

Unknown Speaker 7:32
So one of the things that, you know, people say is to be careful of is, is it something that has a lot of ads on the page, it might not be a credible resource, it depends, it depends on the topic that you’re trying to find. So if you’re looking for a very academic topic, you obviously want to be going towards maybe like a Google Scholar and looking for academic resources, that shouldn’t really have ads. But if you’re looking for other marketing information from your peers, it’s probably not the worst thing to have ads on the page. But just sort of be careful. The types of ads that you see on the page. So this is all

Unknown Speaker 8:09
very on brand. So how to start a blog, website, blueprint, YouTube, so and so forth. And so this sort of just lays out, almost kind of without an agenda of, here’s the questions that you should be looking for. Now, if you’re trying to evaluate, is this information I can use that as you’re reading through it? Are they pitching you their own stuff? Or are they just presenting you information? Are they saying, this is a great way to start a podcast? And so is this you know, you could but you can only use our services in order to start a podcast? Or are they giving you sort of that full 360 of here’s all the different tools and resources. And here’s the gotchas, and here’s the known unknowns. And so really trying to break it down into is this, you know, a really good resource. What do you think, John, where, where would you go with this kind of information? Yeah, you know, this is you kind of kind of come into this challenge with anytime you’re looking for a general topic is that there’s so many people that will do SEO to try and grab that general traffic, like, on that first search page with those ads, those are all hosting companies that want you to start a podcast because they want it to be on their network, so they can sell ads against it. And you right, you know, don’t even own The, the territory. So the real challenge is to kind of drill through and find top, you know, content like this, that’s more just kind of pure instructional, you know, tells you what you want to know and gives you some places other places to look, outbound links are the big thing because something that’s SEO focused, is not going to, you know, have links out, they’re going to try and hold you on the site or drive you to add traffic.

Unknown Speaker 9:48
The other thing too, at some point, you do hit a line where you know, it just helps to have human touch. I mean, I always try to go with primary source or secondary source and so you know, if the

Unknown Speaker 10:00
via LinkedIn or somewhere you can find somebody that’s in your network that you trust their opinion, that can really do a lot to, you know, talk to them as far as which sites are reputable, and where should I start. And that’s a good way to at least get down a path that’s more human based, and not something that’s just there to grab traffic. So let’s say, let’s say you’re sort of, you know, just starting out in your marketing career, and you’ve been handed a pile of topics that you need to write about. So let’s say you don’t have a strong network of people to tap into, you don’t have those subject matter experts, you don’t have a John Wall, who knows everything about podcasting that you can call and say, Hey, John, I need to learn how to start a podcast. What can you tell me?

Unknown Speaker 10:43
What, what are some other ways that you can find out whether or not your source is credible? So John, I’m going to stop sharing my screen and let you share yours, because I know that, you know, whenever we’re looking at websites, and evaluating competitors, and resources and research, you always immediately go to hrs. Yeah, so the you know, SEO tool, again, we come back to is a great way to find out what’s going on at a site and how reputable it is, you know, and so even I’ve pulled up over here, our h refs account and you can see that

Unknown Speaker 11:18
that up, is that up and live.

Unknown Speaker 11:20
Again, this is we don’t have Chris on the line here. Here we go. There we go. Okay, that was the layout thing. So you can see here for marketing, over coffees, the backlinks there that are the big deal, right, there’s 1.2 million links coming into the site, and a domain rating of 70 is strong. So that’s considered a source. So, you know, from there, you would get to Chris or me, and that would at least give you one touch point as far as like, okay, these guys run a site that has had a, you know, has a lot of activity and inbound action. And even, you know, this was already up and running, because it’s on our dashboard. But you can use this for keywords, you know, it can do keyword searches. So you would just put in the four or five topics that you’re looking for, you know, keywords within a single topic, and it will come back to you with the domains that you know, rank the highest. And that will give you a place to start and look around and see who are the sources in that space. The other one that I use, as far as determining a long term reputation is this the Wayback Machine, which is archive.org. This is a fantastic site.

Unknown Speaker 12:23
mission was

Unknown Speaker 12:25
to just grab the entire internet, and I don’t know actually where they’re at now, because it was just insane. You know, for the first 10 years, it was possible that Yeah, they could have the whole internet, you know, backed up and archived. And I don’t even know how they do this now. But as you can see, I mean, this is

Unknown Speaker 12:43
where we have February 2014, you know, the marketing over coffee site. And so you can go back in, and this is actually what the site looked like, what do we had eight years ago.

Unknown Speaker 12:53
And, again, some of the cached images are broken, but you can still see that okay, the site was alive. And yeah, John was bragging about his TiVo, which,

Unknown Speaker 13:04
ya know, just got buried recently.

Unknown Speaker 13:08
Sorry, good friend. But you can go back and the neat thing with this, you know, from here, you can jump forward. And, you know, you can just say, Okay, how did it look a year from then? And it does take a while because it pulls it out of an archive in some cloud thing somewhere. But okay, so here we go. So he had the Olympics. Remember when that was the thing when I used to do sports and places all over the world? John soon, maybe someday. But so yeah, the Wayback Machine that, you know, you can put any URL in there. And I’m always loath to just randomly choose a URL, because you never know what the heck, you’ll find if you know, the domain was owned by somebody else, three years before you got onto that site. But you can put anything you want in there and dig around and see what’s good. Oh, you know, and one that actually is safe, that we can have some fun with this, you can always, you know, check out what Google look like 10 or 15 years ago, you know, we can go to a 2001 Google page. And this should be good for Chuck all this, see what they thought the homepage should look like.

Unknown Speaker 14:01
But this is interesting, because this sort of is the antithesis of what we’re talking about in the sense that you need to be careful of how relevant your sources are in terms of what you’re picking and choosing for your resources for your research. Yeah, absolutely. And then it gets into a whole, you know, the next level of that is once you do have those five or six sites, the you know, reputation checking, in fact, checking stuff near now that you’ve got stuff that you want to verify.

Unknown Speaker 14:34
You know, who do you go to to do that? And who do you trust with that kind of opinion, but trying to have stuff so that you’ve haven’t double triple checked? You know, depending on how dangerous of a pool you’re wading into, you know, if you’re just answering questions for your boss, that’s one thing but if you’re going to go live with an article that you’re hoping will become an authority, you’ve got to level it up a bit.

Unknown Speaker 14:55
So

Unknown Speaker 14:57
I want to share another couple of

Unknown Speaker 15:00
tools that you can use. And so just to be clear, none of these tools have asked for us to feature them on this live stream. These are just tools that we have and to use.

Unknown Speaker 15:11
And so if you have questions about how to get access to them, or if they’re reliable tools, feel free to reach out to us.

Unknown Speaker 15:17
So I’m going to share my screen again, John, we’re getting really good at this whole sharing screen, but without crispy around. So the first tool that I’m going to show is SEM rush or SEM rush. So a lot of people have access to this tool, a lot of agencies are using it. And one of the things that I see a lot is people not using the full capabilities of the tools that they already have access to. So if you’re using a tool like SEM rush, or SEM rush, I honestly don’t know which one it is, I’m sure there’s a reason they like SEM, okay, they like SEMrush.

Unknown Speaker 15:53
SEMrush, actually has on their left hand navigation, this whole content marketing dashboard, and this really cool tool called topic research. So let’s say, I want to find out how to start a podcast.

Unknown Speaker 16:12
And so it’s, I’m researching it, but I’m also finding out what other people have already written about it, because SEM rush is then going to pull in information

Unknown Speaker 16:23
as if I was writing about it. So you know, if I was assigned, how to start a podcast, and I’ve never podcasted before, then I would want to know well what have other people written about so that I’m not a writing the exact same thing that’s already been written 10,000 times m, and B, what are some things that I can learn? So obviously some interesting questions that I want to be thinking about how easy is it? How to legally make my own music? How can a regular person someone who’s not John Wall who’s been doing it for 15 years,

Unknown Speaker 16:56
but then you also start to see other information? Top 10 headlines by backlinks. So the search to give you a good sense of what are some credible resources in terms of doing your research. So podcasting recording Made Easy start your podcast today, that does sound a little click Beatty, like a little bit of like a Hey, we can help you let us just sell you something. But again, you have to sort of check these things out. You can also start to see in social media, promote a podcast on Facebook and six easy steps. You know, from Google, how to start a podcast in 2021. Which, interestingly, is that resource that we were just looking at when we did the advanced search on Google easiest way to make a podcast. So there’s a lot of information within the tools that you already have, that can start to tell you

Unknown Speaker 17:49
what’s already been written about it. And where can I start to see more information, how to make your podcast SEO friendly. These are all really good tips and tricks in terms of things that you should be writing about. And if you’re writing about a topic that you don’t really know that much about really thinking about writing it in terms of you’re educating someone else is probably the best way to approach it so that you are answering the question of what is it? Why do I care about it? When do I use it? Where do I use it? And how do I use it? If you can answer all those questions, then you have made yourself enough of an expert. So

Unknown Speaker 18:28
SEMrush is just one tool. Our refs obviously is another tool that you can use, you know, SEMrush has this, how to start a podcast, different keywords, questions to answer related searches. So there’s a lot of ways to be thinking about how do I wrap my head around this topic. Another tool that I like to rely on, if I’m sort of stumped on where to even start is a social listening tool. So in this instance, we are looking at Talkwalker

Unknown Speaker 18:59
which is one of our affiliate partners, but I just put in podcasting and you can see that in the immediate, it’s it’s too broad, it doesn’t give me information. So this is where John to your point, you want to start to narrow down. So maybe within the last 30 days, what people have been sharing and talking about in terms of podcasting. Maybe I want to

Unknown Speaker 19:21
bring it back down to just the United States because that’s where my podcast is going to be based. And that’s the audience that I’m going to be looking for. And so then you can start to see, are there top podcasters who are talking about podcasting that maybe I want to see if I can ask so John, to your point about the subject matter experts discusses podcasting. You know, Star Trek, that’s perfect right on the line for the nerd herd. And obviously, I left it pretty broad. If I put in how to start a podcast, I might get very different results. How to start a whoops. I always do this I always type in the wrong line.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
When I’m in this, so how to start a podcast.

Unknown Speaker 20:05
And I’m guessing that I’m going to get very different results other than the general. And so this is also sort of a good pro tip in terms of doing your research is start to be as specific as possible in terms of what you’re looking for. Because if you start with that broad search, you’re gonna get a bit of everything. So you can see even this, I’m still getting a lot of junk. And I’m turning junk in terms of information that isn’t necessarily relevant to me. So maybe what this tells me is, if I’m looking for my information on social media, to tell me, I’m probably looking in the wrong place. So I would probably skip the social listing and go back to more credible resources, such as the advanced Google search, looking at the domain rating in H refs, and then something around SEM rush in terms of my topic research, and getting more information. What do you think, John? Yeah, I like that the the big thing, especially this tool, right here is really powerful, because you tend to see that where you jump into some topics, and you’ll find that there’s three or four different categories that dominate the discussion. Like if you were doing something about advertising, you’ll find that programmatic is its whole own branch of articles and experts and stuff. And it has nothing to do with, like, say, video production, or copywriting, or social media ads, you know, Facebook and Google as those are whole branches. So to have something like this, where you can kind of see a map of where the major topics are, in which, you know, being able to see the red ones that are the hot, more active stuff really kind of gets you to, you know, cuts you through the the whole cloud of clutter, and gets you to the stuff that is hopefully more useful. And it in a perfect world, you know, whatever you’re really digging into is two or three of those read terms, and then you’re gonna have some happy hunting. And again, sort of the if you’re if you’re trying to figure out how to synthesize the information in and convey it back out, think about answering these questions. So these are all the questions but they have listed questions that you should be answering in your content of how how to produce a content, how to produce a podcast, how can a podcast benefit your marketing efforts? Which is probably a really great, great question, if you can answer it, how to promote your podcast how to do SEO rank in other search engines, which you can relate back to your podcast, then you have the what questions? What are the some of the best practices for starting a podcast?

Unknown Speaker 22:34
Is there a good search engine for podcasts? And do podcasts in search? Do podcasts increase SEO rankings? Those are all great questions that you should be trying to answer in any piece of content that you’re writing, especially if you don’t know a lot about it. That’s where you start to narrow in your research to make sure that the content that you’re producing is as helpful as possible.

Unknown Speaker 23:00
And so you know, to, to, to your point, John, about the red, so this red here, episode link. So if I highlight that,

Unknown Speaker 23:10
a lot of information, it starts to change in terms of like, how long should a podcast episode be? How long should a podcast be? How to structure a pot podcast episode in three easy steps. So it’s giving you ideas on where to start. In terms of approaching contents? Again, what we’re talking about is researching a topic that you have been asked to write about that you don’t know that much about.

Unknown Speaker 23:36
And so, tools like this really give you a leg up in terms of setting yourself up for success. Yeah, and that’s it. Chris is always talking about the semantic level of that, you know, it’s kind of like you have the one or two questions you want to answer in your article. But it’s so important to see the five other related questions, you know, that gives you a real feel for the landscape. And, you know, when people are doing this, what like, what are the 10 things that they run into? There’s just no other way to, to get to those questions as you start to put the article together. Because, yeah, you because using this as an SEO tool, that’s literally what the majority of people do. They come to this page, they see those five questions, they just write a post that answers those five questions, or they paste it from somewhere else. And that’s why we have all these pages that are, you know, third rate copied echo chamber stuff, because it’s just an easy way to, you know, crack into the top 10. Whereas, if you’re going to use these questions and actually talk to some industry experts are trying, you know, farm some new ground, but some new opinions and new data out there. That’s the kind of stuff that gets you right to the top of the results page.

Unknown Speaker 24:40
Exactly. And so that’s a really good segue just to sort of reference, something that Chris and I talked about on our podcast, which comes out every Wednesday TrustInsights.ai AI slash podcast ti podcast, if you’re looking for it is we were actually talking about Google recently announced a lot of major changes, especially as it reads

Unknown Speaker 25:00
relates to the search engine. And so I’m trying not to butcher the sum. So hopefully I’ll do it justice. But Chris will probably correct me, six ways to Sunday is that Google is going to have a new machine learning model, which will change the way in which search produces results. And I believe it’s called mum and you, I apologize, I don’t remember what it stands for. But he covers all of that in the podcast.

Unknown Speaker 25:26
And so essentially, Google is going to be banking, all of this content that people are creating and storing it. And so as you’re looking for a topic, such as how do I start a podcast, Google will then start looking in its, you know, memory bank of all of the different, contextually relevant content. So John, that’s what you were just talking about was all of the different, contextually relevant content. So if you’re answering the why the what the how the where the when you have a better chance of your content being shown as the result, if you’re just covering one angle of it, and if you haven’t updated it in three years, and if it’s not SEO optimized for keywords that people are looking for, and if you don’t have all of those semantically related keywords in your content, as well, and you don’t have the backlinks. And so gaming the system in terms of SEO, because people have their tips and tricks is apparently not going to be enough anymore, you need to also be creating sort of that 360 view of any one topic, if that’s a topic that you want to be known for. Yeah, cuz that goes right to the core issue of Google wants to get rid of all these sites that are just, you know, some one person writes a good top 10 list, and then 50 other sites, copy it and change a few words here and there, in hopes of just driving ad traffic, you know, they’re not really driving any value. But that’s exactly what they’re trying to stamp out, you know, they’re gonna come to the point where they can spider a page and they’ll say, Yeah, no, this has all been cut and paste in is basically the same thing as this page. But that page went up two years earlier. So we’re not even going to show this in our results. So yeah, as far as saving your job from from the machines, that you Chris isn’t here, we have to have at least one touch to the machines taking over the planet and wiping out humanity. If you don’t do some original research or put some, you know, a human touch on it that makes it new and fresh material, you will just get ignored. That’s right. Um, so, back to the original topic of what we’re covering today, how do you efficiently research something? Well, first of all, take a look at the tools you have at your disposal. So theoretically, you should have a Google search engine at your disposal. So definitely start using the Advanced Search to start to narrow down make sure you’re using the most relevant information, probably skip the advertised post, because they’re likely trying to sell you something.

Unknown Speaker 27:55
You know, take a look at the source. Is it someone’s personal opinion? Is it an academic source? If you’re curious, there’s a you can use Google Scholar actually pull up Google Scholar, just to show what that looks like. So once again, doing the whole screen share, we’re getting pretty good at it, John.

Unknown Speaker 28:13
Alright, so Google Scholar.

Unknown Speaker 28:18
So scholar is basically they have

Unknown Speaker 28:23
pulled together and curated a lot of the major academic sources for you to easily search. And so instead of doing a general search that brings up everything, this narrows down your results to just these academic articles. And so you can see CDC, JAMA, Oxford, science, and so you can see, let’s see if how, how to start a podcast, out of curiosity, what comes up, and so you can see that there are a decent amount of academic resources. The challenge with this particular topic, mirrored with academia is that they’re not going to be super new and relevant. So I can since 2021, there’s still a decent, but they might be off topic. They might be a little bit off of what it is you’re trying to find out. So podcasting has been around for Well, how long have you been alive John? 2006 Yeah, exactly what back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. It’s so funny actually, because I saw on that previous page you had Michael go Hagen and Dan class those guys were like the frig go Hagen did made it huge with a Walt Disney podcast that was like the first niche audience that they jumped on board. So yeah, this is Google Scholar is great in that it just kind of filters out the dirty nasty civilians and you know, the basic, you know, 90% of the internet and sticks only with you. The problem is a lot of times you won’t find anything in here for certain topics, but if there is something in here

Unknown Speaker 30:00
You know, it’s solid. Well, and that’s it. And so you obviously you know who these people are who wrote this, but you’re looking at 2005 2007, you do have, so you want to start a podcast 2015, it might be worth looking just to sort of see what the information says, however, is probably not the latest and greatest, since that in and of itself is already six years old. And technology has changed so much, just in the past six years, how to podcast and archaeology, which is very specific, but could be an interesting angle, how to make a podcast, you have 2016. So there’s definitely some information in here, that could be helpful, but take it with a grain of salt, knowing that it might not be the latest and greatest. And that is one of the challenges with using academic research as your basis.

Unknown Speaker 30:50
You know, I think that one of the things that we should also just sort of mentioned about this, and I 100% just lost my train of thought.

Unknown Speaker 31:00
Well, the big thing with this is, the academic stuff will always default to things that have been peer reviewed. So by nature, it’s going to be older, and you’re going to miss out on the freshest stuff. But you’re far less likely to be bamboozled by something that’s, you know, ridiculous or totally wrong. Yeah, no, and that’s a really good point. Um, the place where I was getting to with citations. And so

Unknown Speaker 31:28
remember from college, when you had to write those research papers, and you had to have your footnotes in your citations,

Unknown Speaker 31:35
articles that reference other articles or cite other academic work or just cite other authors in general, tend to have less bias in them just by nature, because they’re demonstrating number one transparency into where they got their information. And number two, it tends to want to be a little bit more collaborative than just this is my opinion, buy my thing, you know, only listen to me. And so if you’re trying to vet the research that you’re finding, that is definitely a way to be thinking about it in terms of, let’s say, I’m just searching for how do I start a podcast, and then I see, you know, marketing over coffee has some really good resources, and it references all of these other people who have also done it, they’re probably pulling from, they’ve done their own research versus just, I’m writing about this thing. I don’t know anything about it. And therefore, this is just my opinion.

Unknown Speaker 32:29
Yeah, that’s the way to go and see just so much better to have research like this that has been, you know, run through the wringer four or five times. And if you can get something like that, and then get to a primary resource to that’s about as good as you can get, you really can’t do much more than that. Yeah. Um,

Unknown Speaker 32:48
so I think in terms of the basics of researching, we’ve kind of covered it, I do just want to give a quick shout out. Hey, Ty, I hope you’re doing well. I think you had a birthday recently, happy birthday. Um, but it is, you know, if you don’t know a lot about the topic, definitely do your research. And if you’re not sure where to start your research, then start with googling it or putting it into search engines that comes back. But keeping in mind that people do pay a lot of money to get their content to show up first. And, you know, just sort of be aware of that. Think about the source, you know, is it an academic source? Is it a news source? Is it a social media source? I’m going to go out on a limb and say, you probably should not be doing your research on social media. If you are, you’re probably getting not great information.

Unknown Speaker 33:39
Yeah, now, there’s just way too much abuse on social media. And that’s, you know, the incentive to drive traffic for ad dollars just basically corrupts everything. You know, I would give a plug out there for Wikipedia. I mean, you still have to verify that and vet that. But that at least is a good corpus of information. I mean, there’s stuff over there. So it’s, it’s funny you say that, because I was just talking about that this morning with Chris and I was complaining about the accuracy of Wikipedia. And I was sharing this anecdote about a friend that I used to work with, who was responsible for updating Wikipedia pages for the clients. And so he went out on a limb and updated a Wikipedia page that said, I believe, and I may be misquoting this, but that his father

Unknown Speaker 34:28
invented peeps, which was not true. But Wikipedia took that information. And I believe it’s still on there today that his father was the inventor fiefs. And it’s one of those things. I’m like, well, anybody can add information to Wikipedia, and it’s not vetted. It’s not well, but it is that it is not well vetted. It’s not peer reviewed the same way than academic papers. So yes, Wikipedia tends to be the standard, but proceed with caution. Oh, yeah, you have to have and you got to follow the secondary sources. You can’t just trust it.

Unknown Speaker 35:00
Wikipedia author, but I mean, God, Wikipedia is not Reddit, you’re talking about stuff that you can’t believe at all. That would be Reddit. That’s it. Even Reddit for me has gotten so much to the point where it’s you just get you find out what people are fighting about. You don’t even find out what the truth is. It’s just people arguing about it.

Unknown Speaker 35:18
I would definitely put Reddit under the social media. But proceed with caution if that’s where you’re getting your information. Now, that’s not to say that everything on Reddit is unhelpful. But again, just sort of make sure you’re doing your due diligence. Yeah, as you go. Well, and we should make a do a disclaimer, too. You should not be editing your client stuff on Wikipedia. Like that’s, that’s a big No, no, that will land you in Wikipedia jail. It’s where

Unknown Speaker 35:44
I mean, to be fair, this was a good like 10 years ago, so it wasn’t policed nearly as much as it is now. Yeah, yeah. Now it’s there straight up. They know where all the PR firms and they get blacklisted from day one, right?

Unknown Speaker 35:59
The good old Yes, it’s still the wild wild west, make sure to keep your six shooter loaded and

Unknown Speaker 36:05
wear your hat.

Unknown Speaker 36:08
Oh, my goodness. All right. Well, I think unless there’s any other questions or comments, that’s it for this week’s live broadcast. Chris and John are going to be holding it down for me for the next couple of weeks. And I believe let’s see what we have coming up next week. And of course, my mouse just died. So that’s always fun. Next week, John, I don’t know if you know this, you and Chris are going to be covering auditing Google Tag Manager.

Unknown Speaker 36:33
because quite often, we see that there’s hundreds and hundreds of old tags in your tag manager account that you may not even know how to set them up or you may not even have access to them. So definitely going to walk through how to best

Unknown Speaker 36:48
determine what you need to keep and then after that you guys are going to be covering auditing your content.

Unknown Speaker 36:56
All right, we got plenty got the week after that. I’ll be at the tweeter center with journey and poison. So be sure to come check that show out. Are you really no, I’m totally making that up. Oh my god. I’m actually jealous for a second. Yeah, that would be a hell of a show. Guys. When you’re talking about auditing my content. I was just like, when I hear audit, I just immediately start to not off site.

Unknown Speaker 37:17
Well,

Unknown Speaker 37:20
I better find something damn funny in there.

Unknown Speaker 37:26
All right. And with that, that wraps up today’s show. Thanks, everyone.

Unknown Speaker 37:35
Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources and to learn more check out but Trust Insights podcast at Trust insights.ai slash ti podcast and a weekly email newsletter at Trust insights.ai slash newsletter. got questions about what you saw on today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

 


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