By Larsen Grey
What if there was a company whose sole purpose was to provide researchers with an astounding depth and breadth of premium content for a wide range of business verticals?
Enter the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company, Northern Light, established in the early 1990s. Northern Light offers search and content integration technology solutions for enterprises and individuals.
We originally looked at the company for its white paper network, but what we found was a powerful tool for independent marketers and writers to use for gathering very focused research and improving time efficiency in their search process.
While we’ve all become accustomed to using Google, Northern Light offers a time-saving alternative built through well-established content partnerships.
Northern Light features licensed content not found elsewhere and websites that are hand-selected and vetted by the company. There is no advertising on the site, no pop-ups, no paid inclusions and no text ads.
The content available in the “Business Research Engine” covers multiple industries with articles, news stories and reports that provide up-to-the-minute commentary and perspective for researchers. In addition, the engine includes over 100 million pages from the Business Web of over 22,000 websites.
The engine also includes over 5000 white papers. The white papers are delivered in a joint partnership with TechTarget and are then combined with Northern Light’s other content.
Northern Light holds over 1.3 million articles from over 1400 premium publications that are mostly industry trade journals. In addition, there are numerous case studies and other IT product information available.
For white paper writers and researchers, the tool provides a great ballast with which to anchor your in-depth research for a new white paper. If, for example, you do a search on the term “CRM” with the Northern Light Business Research Engine Journal Library, it expediently brings 10 hits from trade journals, including leading publications like ABA Bank Marketing, Customer Relationship Management magazine, Network World, Chief Executive magazine and CIO for you to review and use as source material.
“If you are doing analysis instead of trying to buy a CRM solution at this moment, the Northern Light list is much denser in useful information that features analysis, commentary and perspective,” notes C. David Seuss, CEO of Northern Light.
For marketing and sales professionals who rely on web-based business research, this engine is a fantastic way to not only receive content quickly, but more importantly, cut through the ever-growing clutter of “content” in exchange for more relevant, actionable and timely analysis.
The company offers credit card subscriptions to access the premium content and features with a monthly subscription base of $9.95 or 24-hour day passes for $4.95. Northern Light also offers annual enterprise licenses available for $5000 for up to 50 seats and for $36,000 yearly for an unlimited number of users.
Fr-ee search engines equal hours and hours of research. Northern Light’s offerings at a bargain rate of $9.95 a month, with higher relevancy and real-time news and research, equal what I would term as “priceless.”
