If there’s one constant in modern life it’s this: research. No matter the topic, it’s imperative that most of us conduct thorough research for a variety of purposes online.
We research products and options when we want to buy something. We research markets and competitors when we want to sell something. We research topics and exes when we want to know or learn something.
We do research on the internet for so many different reasons, it can be hard to think about “online research” as one task—but if you add it all up, many of us spend a lot of time doing research on the internet. So there’s some serious value in understanding how to do that research more thoroughly, accurately, and quickly.
Broadly speaking, the typical online research project goes through 6 key steps. While you probably don’t tick off all these steps every time you research something online, following them can help ensure your research is complete, accurate, and useful.
Let’s talk about what those steps are and why each one is worthwhile for just about any online research you do.
This first step is where you’ll get specific about just what it is you’re looking for. What’s your end-goal? Why are you conducting this research? What are you hoping to learn or achieve?
For market research, this might be developing a full understanding of the competitors in the space and their positioning. For product research, you might be trying to arrive at the best option for you to buy.
The key is to make a comprehensive list of the research questions you want to answer and the individual items that interest you. This list will help inform where and how you do your research and ensure you don’t wind up with a bunch of information that doesn’t help or interest you.
This step will help you define and narrow down the type of journals, databases, websites, etc. that you’ll look to for information.
For example, if you’re doing product research and you want to know how valuable existing customers find a given product, you may turn to prominent third-party review websites. If you’re doing medical research, you may look into the relevant medical journals for your topic.
Step 3 is likely the part of the process you most often associate with “research.” Now’s the time to dig into your research sources, read up on the topic, and look to see how other people have answered the questions you laid out for your research.
The important part of this step is to stay organized and on-task. It’s easy to get lost in all the information, so it’s best to have a clear process and to keep your sources and learnings organized.
In today’s digital world, this step is even more important than the rest. No matter the topic of your research, you need to take the time to understand and evaluate your sources. Who’s writing about the topic? Why are they interested or invested in it? Do they have anything to gain from what they’re saying?
This step is when you can identify any biases you or your sources have. Think of these biases as gaps in your research—and fill them in with opposing viewpoints and additional information.
Whether as a result of biases or something else, it’s not uncommon to find gaps in the research that’s already been done. When that happens, you may consider conducting your own primary research to help fill in those holes in your information.
For example, if you’re missing qualitative market research, you may choose to conduct an online focus group of consumers in that market. For medical research, filling in the gaps might mean conducting an extensive clinical trial. For research into your own customers, on the other hand, it might be as simple as sending out a brief online survey asking for feedback. You can also use online survey platforms to reach a broader base.
Once steps 1 through 5 are finished, you’re ready to start digging into your body of research and drawing your conclusions. This is where you’ll make a final decision on which product to buy or identify where in the market to position your own business, for example.
When you think about “online research,” what sort of research method do you imagine? Many of us likely think about Googling and reading articles—and that is one method for doing research online. But it isn’t the only one—far from it.
Below are some of the other common online resources for research methods and strategies you can draw on during your research.
Content analysis and social media or social network analysis
Content analysis is the typical web search and read method of conducting research. In this case, you’re consuming secondary research that’s already been conducted and learning from that.
Focus groups
A focus group is when you bring together a group of people to take part in a guided discussion—often this discussion is about their experience with a particular product, brand, political campaign, ad, or TV series/movie. You might picture these happening in-person, but they can also be conducted online using video chat or conferencing software.
Interviews
Interviews are similar to focus groups—you’re asking real people for very specific information. The difference is that interviews are more often done one-on-one versus in a group. Interviews can also follow a less conversational and more transactional question-answer approach.
Questionnaires and surveys
Questionnaires and surveys share the question-and-answer approach of an interview, but they aren’t typically done live or in real-time. Surveys can be emailed or mailed out to respondents or shared on social media. The respondent completes the questionnaire on their own time and returns it to the researcher when finished.
Web-based experiments
Web-based experiments follow a more regimented and traditional set of processes designed to yield scientifically significant results. There are three main types of experiments:
While the topic varies, many of these experiments can be adapted to take place online.
Clinical trials
Clinical trials are a type of experiment most often done in medical and psychological research. In a clinical trial, the experiment is designed to answer a very specific set of questions. The classic example of a clinical trial is a drug or pharmaceutical trial—designed to answer whether a particular drug affects a given disease or injury.
Online ethnography
In an ethnographic study, the researcher essentially lives among their research subjects and observes their behavior, social structures, and more. Ethnography is most commonly used in behavioral research like sociological and anthropological studies. Online ethnography simply refers to the method by which the researcher interacts with subjects—online.
Online research comes in all shapes and forms, but talking about “research” in the abstract can feel a little nebulous. To help you wrap your head around the kinds of online research we’re referring to for our purposes, here are some of the most common types of online research.
Basic research refers to broad studies and experiments done, not to answer a specific question or prove a hypothesis, but to create a foundation for additional studies or experiments.
For example, a study of how caffeine affects the brain would be considered basic research. Its results would increase general knowledge on the topic and likely inspire more specific experimentation.
Here’s another example of what basic research looks like—and how it can often blend into applied research:
Quantitative research involves studying something using statistical or mathematical techniques and it’s used to understand how often a particular phenomenon occurs. The “quantitative” part of this type of research refers simply to numbers.
Here’s a common example of what quantitative research looks like in action:
Qualitative research, on the flipside, focuses more on observations and non-numerical qualities. It’s used to answer questions about how and why phenomena occur, versus how often.
Here’s an example of what a typical qualitative research study looks like:
Market research and competitive research refer to gathering information about a particular industry and the companies currently doing business in it. It often involves mapping out the positioning of competing companies or products and is usually done by the companies in the market (or those hoping to be).
Here’s what a typical market research study looks like:
Customer research is when a business seeks to learn more about their customers (or their competitors’ customers). Often, customer and consumer research are included in the overall market research process we mentioned above.
Here’s what a typical customer research study looks like:
Whether you’re new to conducting research online or you’ve been doing it for years, there are always tips and tricks you can employ to streamline, strengthen, and refocus your research process. With that in mind, here are our top tips for conducting high-quality research online.
With all of the information available on the internet, it’s really easy to get lost. Maybe you end up chasing down rabbit holes or trying to answer new questions every time they arise. Either way, you’re distracted from answering the original questions you set out to.
That’s why it’s so important to get clear about what those questions are, and hold yourself to researching those answers. This is what steps 1 and 2 in our online research process above are designed to help with.
While similar to the previous tip, defining your goal for research is more action-oriented. When you get answers to the questions outlined above, what will you do with them? All the questions you seek to answer with your online research should serve this overarching goal—helping you make a decision or choose your next course of action.
For example, your goal for travel research might be to choose and book a destination for your next family vacation. For competitive research, your goal may be to identify a niche audience to target within your industry.
If you’re using scientific papers, medical studies, legal reviews, and other academic research, you know you’re in for some dense, lengthy reading. So before you commit to reading anything, check out the abstract first. If you don’t find anything compelling in the abstract, you can safely skip that paper.
As we mentioned before, the internet completely changes the stakes when it comes to research. There’s almost no limit to the amount of research you can do. That’s why it’s vital that you create a system for determining which information you’ll look at, plus how and where you’ll store it. Here are a few suggestions for staying organized:
Online research can be incredibly valuable in helping you make informed decisions on a whole range of topics—but it is possible to take research too far, ending up with way more information than you can adequately process. Avoiding analysis paralysis is the only way to ensure your research makes your life easier, instead of the other way around.
Clearly outlining your goals and questions to answer is a good first step in avoiding analysis paralysis. The second part comes down to recognizing when you have enough information to make a decision. Once that happens, it’s usually time to set the research aside and act.
In the time of #fakenews and corporation-funded scientific research, it’s more important than ever to evaluate your sources for online research. To start, just get in the habit of paying attention to who ran the study, wrote the paper, or created an article.
From there, you can look deeper into their objectivity (or lack thereof). Ask yourself whether the researcher has something to gain or lose from the information they’re sharing. Are they interpreting objective information through their own angle? Equally important: how current is the information presented?
In addition to evaluating the objectivity of your research sources, it’s even more important to identify and be aware of your own biases toward the subject matter.
Whether you lack the time, expertise, or just desire to conduct thorough online research, there are many reasons to delegate your research to someone else. Online research, in particular, can easily be handled by a virtual assistant (more on that later!)
When the time comes to dive into online research, most of us default to starting with an internet search on Google, followed by trying different search terms and combing through endless search result listings. That’s a fine place to start, but there are also tons of other reputable databases and search engines that can help you get straight to the most accurate and up-to-date research on just about any topic.
Below, we recommend 13 tools that can help you find reputable sources, organize your research, and even conduct your own primary research.
If you’re looking for more info on various aspects of researching online, here are a few more top-notch resources you can reference.
The advice and resources above are enough to turn anyone into a pro online researcher—but do you really have the time or desire to do your own research online? Regardless of how well done, effective internet research always requires one big investment: time. There’s no getting around the time investment it takes to conduct valuable online research.
Instead of investing that time out of your own busy schedule, you could outsource your online research efforts to a virtual assistant (VA). That way, you get the benefit of making informed decisions without spending days or even weeks wading through abstracts and research articles.
When you work with a Delegated virtual research assistant:
In both cases, as your VA gains experience working with you, they’ll get better and better at pulling together exactly the kind of research and insights you’re looking for. Some aspects of research they can tackle include:
We know that delegating something as broad and nebulous as “research” can feel a little foreign if you haven’t outsourced it before. Most of the concerns we hear from people are very quickly quelled by the time savings that come with delegating their research.
That said, if you’re feeling unsure, here are a few of the questions we hear frequently:
How does all this work?
Your Delegated VA is available to you whenever you need them. They can pull together research articles and sources, organize and annotate them, present research summaries and conclusions, and help with many of the tasks involved with conducting your own primary research.
What kind of research can a Delegated VA handle?
Delegated VAs can handle these types of research right off the bat:
That said, with a little guidance and training from you, our VAs can take over just about any kind of research you need done.
How will my VA know what information to look for?
Initially, your VA will base this judgment on the information you provide to them. Any information you ask for, they’ll pull together for you. For basic research, they’ll be able to handle most anything you need.
For more specialized research areas (like medical and legal research), your VA may need a little more help from you in the beginning. Rest assured, after a few projects, they’ll be able to handle just about everything you can throw at them.
Can my VA handle next steps after research is done?
If you provide your Delegated VA with the access and information they need to take the next step, they can do that—whether that’s booking a trip based on travel research, purchasing their recommended product, or something else entirely.
How will my VA communicate with me?
Your Delegated VA will communicate with you any way you prefer. If you choose to communicate via Slack, email, phone, or morse code, your VA will work with your preferences to streamline communication.
Whether it’s product research, medical research, or something else entirely, conducting thorough and accurate research online takes time—and going without isn’t a great option either.
If you don’t have the time, desire, or expertise to perform your own internet research, you can easily turn the keys over to a virtual assistant. With a little guidance, they can handle a lot more than you may think.
Then, you can spend less time Googling around and more time acting on your research findings.
Research problem and research question: The central question your research sets out to answer, or the central problem your research sets out to solve.
Correlation: A connection or relationship between two variables.
Causation: A connection or relationship between two variables where a change in one variable creates a change in the other.
Findings: The results and conclusions of your research.
Scientific method: An empirical, step-by-step method whereby hypotheses are formed and experiments/observations either affirm or disprove the hypothesis.
Sampling method: A method for collecting data from a small sample of a given population.
Research methodology: The specific techniques and procedures you use to identify and analyze information about your topic.
Control group: A group within an experiment to which no changes are made in the variable being studied. Control groups are used for comparison to better identify how changes in a variable affect the other group.
Experimental group: The group within an experiment which is changed or manipulated.
Primary research: Data collected directly by you, the researcher.
Secondary research: Data previously collected by other researchers.
Hypothesis: An educated guess or theory about how an experiment will turn out.
Abstract: A brief summary of the contents of a research paper or study.
Bias: Assumptions made without credible evidence, often that skew the ultimate outcome of a study. Bias can be caused by beliefs held by the researcher or by errors in sampling or data analysis.
