3. Write a blog post

A blog post presents an opportunity for you to discuss your motivation and your results. For me, these work best when they’re less technical than the paper and much, much shorter. The objective is not to go through every result and every robustness check, but to focus on the big message. What are the one or two things you’d most like people to take away from your paper, and what’s the least technical level of evidence you can use to convince most readers? Link to your paper for the technical details. McKenzie and Özler published evidence that blog mentions increase abstract views and downloads of research papers.

If you have access to an established blog, that’s a natural venue. I publish most blog posts about my research here at Development Impact, such as Monday’s post on measuring educational impacts for vulnerable groups or this earlier post on cash transfers and trust in local government.

Otherwise you can pitch a piece to a site like VoxDev – here’s a piece I had accepted there on healthcare in Nigeria, or an occasional blog like Economics that Really Matters.

But once you write a blog post, it’s not automatic that people will read it: I tweet and email and Facebook post about blog posts that I believe may be of interest to readers.

See here for all our tips on how to write