Finding a Topic to Write About: Broad or Narrow

This is a guest post by Zujava author Paula Atwell (aka LakeErieArtists).

If you want people to find your article online, then the best article to write is on a very narrow topic.  This is counter-intuitive to most people because they think if they include everything on their topic, then people are bound to find something they are interested in.

That is not how writing online works.

The reason for this is that most people find information online through searching via search engines.  If you think about how you search online, you will realize that when you enter a one word broad search term, you get way too many answers, most of which are not even related to what you are looking for.  In order to find the exact information that you are looking for, you will need to put in more descriptive words into your search term to narrow down the search to better matches.

In the industry of writing online, this is what we call “long tail searches” or “long tail keywords.”  As a writer, you want to match your article with the people who are searching for your exact topic.  Then when they land on your page, they will be interested enough to scroll down the page.

The better you know a topic, either through personal experience or research, the better you can dig into that topic to find more details to write about.  Detailed pages like this, with exact matches to search terms are the most successful pages.

What if you have more to say about a topic than you can put on just one page, or you want to write about several different search terms related to a topic.  If that is the case, that is perfect!  You can now develop a specialty around that topic which is often called a niche topic.  I often look to write about 10 pages on any given topic in the hopes that people will land on one, then jump to at least one more before they move on.  The longer that you can keep them on your pages, the better a chance is that they will click on a paying link creating income for you.

Be sure to read more of Paula Atwell's leaves on Zujava, or read more tips for writing on the web on her website, Writing Online.

Intro photo of narrow pathway by Bree Prince, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.