How to Pick a Blogging Niche on Medium

Tips and tricks on how to find a blogging niche for Medium and other platforms

Last week I set a personal writing challenge to run an ‘experiment’ on Medium to see if generalist writers can still perform well on the platform vs having to pick a niche blogging topic.

The only problem with starting the challenge is — I haven’t picked a niche before.

I’ve written about ~7 topics so far and every week has been marking down ideas to write about. Topics ranging all the way from Timbuk Tu to why the House of Lords still exists.

Fun stuff! (maybe)

But how can one pick a niche to write 12 articles for in only 4 weeks? Sounds easy, but I have the long-term attention span of a housefly in heat.

So I did what I usually do — researched how to do it first, outlined the parameters, and funneled down to an answer.

General advice on finding a niche

First off, a summary of common points from bloggers with way more knowledge than me on the subject (note, some of this advice is mutually exclusive and not all applicable at the same time):

1. Follow the money — pick a niche based on monetary potential (many sites out there list top 10 best and worst niches to make money from)
2. Follow yourself — ask yourself what is special about you? What expertise, experience, or thought processes do you have that you can share with the world?
3. Follow your passion — what are you truly passionate about that you can be honest, transparent, and draw a line in the sand on?
4. Follow the crowd — pick a niche based on up-and-coming specialties (think electric vehicles, upcoming elections, etc)
5. Find a niche of a niche — find a broad topic that interests you, then go down the SEO rabbit hole to find a smaller subset of that topic (ex. go on google and see what comes up for your topic, type one extra word at a time and see what new pops up, rinse and repeat)

Setting the parameters of the blogging niche

1. The niche should be able to be written about by me for longer than just the 4 weeks — you know, in case I’m wrong and do need to niche down :)
2. The niche shouldn’t be one of the main topics on Medium, nor should it be among the least written about
3. The niche shouldn’t be in my favorite top 3 topics, as I will continue to write about those beyond the scope of this experiment anyway
4. It has to be fun to write about, I don’t want to lose my newfound interest in writing after all
5. The niche should have a decent chance at gaining Top Writer status — if I’m going to focus one month on a subject, I might as well try for a trophy of sorts!
6. If I could find a niche that can spread 2–3 similar topics, then the chance at hitting a single Top Writer would be even higher

Funneling down to a writing niche

After doing the research above, I took a couple of days to think of different strategies to narrow down my niche for this experiment.

I kept coming back to the same ~5 general interests that I think and talk about a lot during daily life — but this violates my point #3 above.

So I had a thought, why not focus on point #5 instead — Top Writer status.

If you do some reading on the subject, there’s plenty of advice on Medium on how to attain Top Writer status, here’s 2 short but good reads on the subject for example:

Finding the niche for my niche

I researched further into the subject and noticed a common thread that was absent from most of these Top Writer articles — most of them don’t state how to find a topic — just how to get to the top of one.

After even more research, I realized why that’s the case — Medium simply doesn’t state which tags have Top Writer status available. It’s up to their private discretion.

How do we find out more about an unofficially posted subject? Research! (Are you beginning to see a common hobby of mine yet?)

I finally found the magic bullet of an answer — or so I thought. I noticed a nice change in the Medium app (or at least a feature I hadn’t seen before).

If you scroll down far enough on the homepage of the app, you eventually come to a short horizontal list of green topics it suggests as alternative subjects to read about.

You can expand this list to the maximum.

Eureka I thought! (If I used such terms in my head)

Certainly, every one of these 101 topics would likely be the most written about on the platform. And since each of those topics have a tag of the same name, they should, therefore, each have a Top Writer status. Right?

Solid logic, I thought.

But it required some work. I started an Excel listing down each of the 101 topics, then manually used the browser version to find and count Top Writers.

Only 36 of the 101 topics on the list actually have a Top Writer status in the associated tag!

Disappointing results but it’s still a big list for me to choose from.

I ended up spending some time filling out the rest of the Excel-based on my interests, the popularity of the tags, and how many Top Writers were in the subject.

Here’s a snippet:

Another assumption I had — that the topics were organized by the number of tag hits — was wrong, again! It was an interesting list to build and I will take some time another day soon to write an article on the results.

Finally arriving at the answer

Even though I was wrong on my assumptions above, the process still got me to my final goal for a month of ‘niching’ — the topic of mindfulness.

1. It’s a subject I’ve been wanting to read into for a while — so it will be enjoyable
2. It might very well have applications to my real life in the future
3. It has a few Top Writer related niches (even though mindfulness itself doesn’t) so I can attack several topics at once, potentially
4. It’s in the middle of the pack on the above topic list I made — so it’s a well-read topic but not extremely competitive (42,000 tag hits on the subject)

So that’s it, thanks for reading! I hope any writing newbies out there similar to myself can also gain some insights on the subject.

For me, the next 4 weeks should be an interesting semi-obsession over mindfulness and its effects on people.

J.J. Pryor

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