The Research Phase: Where Every Great Article Is Actually Made

Kavya Mehra 3 min readJuly 1, 2024

The source stack

3 primary sources (interviews), 2 authoritative reports, 1 contrarian POV. Any less and the piece reads like rewrites of the top-ranking articles.

1:1 for tactical posts, 2:1 for thought leadership, 3:1 for flagship guides. More research equals more defensible POV.

Lift specific phrases from interviews verbatim. Original phrasing is what makes the piece sound like someone actually thought about this.

A case study in gated content that actually worked — why it converted and what we'd replicate.

The tradeoff between two content styles and when to invest in each.

If your content briefs are shorter than your drafts, you're not briefing. Here's the bar we hold ourselves to.

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