You might not even aware of the fact that you have a niche.
For some, it was a conscious choice to niche down, others haven fallen into it without noticing.
I’m a bit of both.
Change
If you’ve been following me for a while, you know what I write about frequently.
What you might not know is that my topic selection had undergone a rather drastic change during the first half of my Medium journey.
When I started, I wrote about self-help, life lessons, minimalism, even nutrition, fitness, and fashion. Lately, not so much. I can’t stand posts about self-help anymore. Most of those feel made-up anyway. My articles weren’t better.
Niches
I’ve stayed in a handful of niches for the majority of Medium stories over the past 6 months. Articles on writing, freelancing, Medium itself, making money, and YouTube.
Out of these 5, what do you think has been the most popular topic the past 3 months?
As I stated in the headline, my top earning stories all came from 1 topic over the past 3 months. No other one came remotely close, actually.
The surprising winner
I surely thought it would be stories about Medium. Nope.
The winner is YouTube. By a long shot. My stories about YouTube have been gaining a huge amount of traction since mid 2021.
I’ve extensively written about my journey with faceless YouTube channels, how to create them and what to use, and recently I talked about the dangers of faceless channels, after of mine got kicked off the YouTube partner program.
I have a whole Medium list about faceless YouTube channels here:
How to Make Money With a Faceless YouTube Channel
Operating, starting, and earning with a faceless YouTube channel.burkrosemann.medium.com
In part, this success is due to a couple of viral stories that gathered over 250K views alone. Once I noticed they were going viral, I used some tricks to benefit from this temporary jump in views:
- I created a Medium list with related stories and linked that at the end of my viral stories. Medium lists are powerful.
- I wrote follow-up stories. Shortform as well as long form.
- I used similar tags.
- I tried to publish with the same publications (to get traffic from the related-section on Medium).
Should you niche down
Well, apparently the answer is yes. If you want to earn more money, it might help.
Still, I’d like to say no. Niching down has helped me, but I don’t want to write about one thing all the time. That’s boring.
Nevertheless, I would advise you to stay within a small set of topics, maybe related niches. After all, you want to please your audience. And your audience expects certain topics from you. That’s most likely the reason they follow or subscribe to you.
That doesn’t mean you should only write about the same 5 things. Sprinkling in something here and there is great. How would you conquer new niches without that?
The bottom line
Whether you like it or not, you probably have a niche. If you don’t think so, your audience might disagree.
Utilize the power of this niche. But don’t get carried away. Don’t overuse this one topic. Venture into other topics. Try new niches.
I didn’t know YouTube was going to be my top earning niche 6 months ago, neither did I push it. It just happened. Now that I know, I do write more about YouTube because, after all, I’m in here to make some money too. I have to. Medium is one of my main income sources as a full-time content creator.
I’ll still write about whatever feels right.
