Last night I moved my office to the coffee shop so I could work on an article on the uses of natural salts in body care products. Most of the conversations I’ve had in this lifetime about salts start and end with “Please pass the….” But one of my clients sells bath products, and we decided on a meaty article about the properties of Dead Sea salts and others.

When I search Google for “natural salts,” I get 393,000 references. If I search for “natural salts body care” I get close to 2 million hits. And the hits are useless for my research. The first few pages are people who sell various types of salt or who sell products containing natural salts. What I really need is a list of types of natural salts, ingredients found in natural salts, etc.

Google is always my first stop for an information search, but if I see immediately that I’m not finding what I need, I head off to my three favorite behind-the-scenes information sources.

1. Books on Amazon.com
   I took my search for “natural salts” to the Amazon.com website. There I found “Water and Salt, The Essence of Life” as well as “Salt: A World History.” The killer thing is that Amazon lets me search inside the books so I can find references I need. Not all books are completely indexed, but frequently I can find what I need and refer to the book as a reference in the article. Sometimes the author has a website as well, so I can find an expert and get info from his book and his site.
2. Professional associations
   Believe it or not, there’s a Salt Institute, a collection of salt manufacturers that network and share information about their industry. In fact, there’s probably a professional association for about anything you could possibly imagine. I used to be the education director for the International Erosion Control Association. There’s a roller skating association, coin laundry association, chimney sweep association, etc.

   Most associations act as gathering places for the industry thought leaders. Each annual conference may have dozens if not hundreds of educational sessions. Many of these associations put their speakers’ presentations online after the meetings, so you can download PowerPoint presentations on cutting-edge topics for the industry.

   In addition, you can frequently peruse the industry magazines and journals from the association website. These don’t often show up in the first few pages of a Google list.

3. Wikipedia and Wikipedia reference material
   Wikipedia entries on a topic, including natural salts, generally show up on the first few pages of Google. You can get some great general information from the entry itself, but I love the reference list at the bottom. A Wikipedia footnote sent me to the History of Salt Bathing from the San Francisco Bath Salt Company.

Final note: Never did find enough info for a great article. The Salt Institute focused on plain old table salt manufacturing. The books talked about salt for nutrition. And salt bathing wasn’t what I wanted to focus on. So I wrote another article on the fly and finished about midnight. Note to self: No more flat-rate projects.