I had a bit of fun a while back writing a blog post about a little observation I'd made.

I'd noticed a large number of courses being promoted on various forms of social media. Yet when you went to the home page of the social media expert teaching the course, most of the real estate on the page was given over to getting you to subscribe to their emails rather than anything to do with social media.

You can read the post and look at the examples yourself here.

What was especially interesting to me though was the buzz the blog post got. Nearly 150 social shares in 24 hours, and double the normal website traffic I get on a single day.

I think it was the combination of the slightly controversial topic (highlighting the discrepancy between what some experts say and sell, and what they actually do) together with facts backing up the piece.

It's easy to have a controversial opinion. To disagree with the status quo or accepted wisdom.

But it's far more powerful if you have data and facts to back up your argument.

In my case it took about 30 minutes to take screen shots of the various expert websites and to highlight what they were prioritising on them. After that the blog post wrote itself.

Could you do something similar in your field?

Pick something that's been nagging at you or annoying you – and do the research to confirm or deny your opinion.

It's a no lose situation. You're either going to find stuff that backs up your opinion and elevates it into a rock solid blog post. Or you're going to find your opinion is wrong – in which case you've learned something useful.

Why not take 30 minutes today to get that research done so you can create that killer blog post you've been wanting to write for ages?