Finding a Niche on Medium Instead of Writing About Many Topics

Some tips and tricks on finding a niche to write about on Medium for newbies, if that’s what you really want to do

A week ago, I sat down to figure out how to go about choosing a niche on Medium. If any writer truly wants to be successful in the long-term on Medium, one of the most common pieces of advice you’ll hear is to choose a single niche and double down on that.

My take on it was that surely writers could talk about topics from A to Z on Medium and still gain a steady following over time. I contested the niche-only view highlighted by T.S. Johnson in a response post to her’s:

The creative part of me still hopes that a platform like Medium, with as much potential it has, can reward creativity in a wide range of subjects rather than just one.

I have an inkling that she’s probably right, but I decided to have some fun with it anyway! I set out the parameters of a small personal challenge to complete over the next month, showing my weekly results and a wrap up at the end:

Medium for noobs

If you look at it from a newbie point of view, there are certainly some topics that are broad and popular enough to talk about for years of writing. But as a newbie, those topics are already insanely popular and competition to get noticed is extremely high.

So what’s the easiest path of entry for a new blogger? Find a smaller niche and attack that. It makes sense, mostly.

My issue with this last point is that most of these smaller niches are still small for a reason. And therefore likely don’t have as much potential to write about over and over again for years.

I’m not a fan of beating dead horses after all.

Help with niches

If you’re stumbling upon this post as a new writer and would like some help finding a niche, let me please introduce you to Casey Botticello. He has an insane amount of articles about how to improve and succeed in Medium.

I wrote the other day about a theory I had that all of the main ‘topics’ as listed by Medium would be a great source of Top Writer status. Turns out I was only partially right. But it led me to create a full list of Top Writer tags (only to later notice Casey’s article below that had most of these listed already):

Here’s my article on narrowing down to a niche after researching the subject a while:

Finally, after running through my research on Medium and referring to Casey’s article above, I expanded the Top Writer list to also count how many Top Writers are in each tag, how many articles/posts have been written, and highlighted some of the more interesting segments:

I hope the above info can help any of you fellow newbie bloggers out there!

‘Rant’ over.

Thanks for reading! Have a wonderful day and check out some of my other stuff here. — J.J. Pryor