This advice applies to websites, people and small businesses aiming to provide guides & articles (content in other words) on practically any subject. For example a website with information about products, about varieties of fish or whatever. This advice will be most relevant to people just starting out writing and creating content, and people with new websites and businesses which they intend to grow. I?ve discovered a lot about researching and writing this type of material for websites over the last year or so but the most important lesson I?ve learnt is this: When deciding on subject matter for an article always start as narrow and specific as you can.

What I mean is this. Imagine you were creating a website on places to visit in Wales. It would be very tempting to come up with article ideas and titles such as ?Places to visit around Cardigan Bay?, or ?Great Restaurants in South Wales? (ok this would be a very short article). People are always falling into this trap, somehow thinking that they have to write some kind of ?definitive guide?.

The problem with starting out with very general article titles and outlines like this is that you are typically setting yourself up for a bigger task than you think and the effort versus reward ratio will typically be very low.

Say you want an article of 2-3 pages (typical on the web). The amount of effort doing research to create a balanced general article on restaurants in the south of Wales will be massive. Then you have to condense it down to 2-3 pages anyway and loose a lot of the material you will have obtained. What you should be doing to begin with is writing a 2-3 page article on as specific a subject as possible. In this case it would be likely to be an article about one restaurant. What you will have at the end is one 2-3 page article that will not have taken much research, editing and condensing. You might not think that a very specific subject is enough for a 2-3 page article, the thing is most people underestimate. Once you start writing it fills up very fast. What?s more the value and usefulness of the very narrow and specific article to visitors of your website is probably more than the general article, it is also more likely to be unique meaning that anyone searching for information on this specific subject on Google or other search engines will likely find you article at the top of the list of search results. You can still add keywords and phrases to the article like ?Restaurants in South Wales? so that people searching on those terms in Google and other search engines may find it, although it will be low in the search results unless you website is highly ranked in general (this can come later).

Then if you actually carry on with the website, you carry on doing very specific articles for a while. One restaurant, then another? When you have enough material that you are very familiar with then you can then probably knock out a ?general guide? type article and not spend an inordinate amount of time doing it. You will also have a site packed with very specific and useful information. So there you go, its tempting but you really must avoid the temptation to write very general ?definitive guide? type articles that involve research. If you are already an expert then fair enough go for it, but in most cases specific, targeted, narrow subject matter articles rule. Most people who start websites wanting to be the ?definitive guide to ?? underestimate the work and research involved, get bored and the site never sees the light of day.

To summarise

* Your first article or other content should be very targeted and specific. If you are a website on broadband providers, then write an article on one specific broadband provider, or even better one product from one specific broadband provider
* Don't worry about thinking you won't have enough to write about on a very specific subject. Try to break down the article into a number of relevant headings and then write paragraphs around them. You will soon find that an article will flow and you will normally end up with more than enough useful information to fill 2-3 pages

* It would be best if your article is on a unique subject, which is much easier to achieve with very specific articles and content as opposed to ?general guides?
* Unique articles on narrow, targeted subject matter will bring more traffic to your website because you will have less competition in search engine results and won't need a highly ranked website with millions of other sites linking to you
* Continue growing your website with narrow subject matter articles and content until you website's popularity grows - check the number of visitors you get and other factors such as your Google Page Rank
* When your website is deemed as popular by search engines you may begin to receive visitors who are searching for more general information or general guides. This is the point to start turning your site into a more general and definitive resource

George Sanders is an expert freelance writer on e-publishing, article and content creation, search engine marteting and SEO. George also operates a number of small business websites Please visit: Diet, health and slimming articles Gift ideas, home decoration and figurines