Niche or Die: You Need A Niche If You Want to Succeed Under the New MPP

This system doesn’t favor generalists. Either you niche down or get left behind.

You need a niche if you want to succeed in this new MPP landscape.

Outside of poets catching the short end of the stick, there is nothing that I’m more sure of after a week operating under the new system.

I touched on this briefly when I wrote about my initial five thoughts on the new MPP changes here:

The writers who have a niche will flourish (or stand a better shot of flourishing) than those who are generalists or essayists. And just to be clear, I’m not just saying this, I’m practicing it as well. I’m currently in the process of separating my Writing/Medium content from my Sex/Relationship content.

Right now I’ve made between $12 to $16 a day under the new system with my one account, and now that I’m separating my content into two distinct niches under two separate accounts, I expect that I’ll average $12 to $16 a day or better from both accounts.

And here’s why:

The Old Clap System Favored Generalists

It’s not that having a niche wasn’t important before it’s just it wasn’t necessary to have success on Medium. As a matter of fact, with the clap system, sticking to a niche could hinder your ability to make money if earning from Medium was your primary concern.

Under the old system, you could crunch the numbers and get a sense of what a fan was worth to you. This number would vary by writer, but each writer could determine the worth of their particular audience and then aim to hit that number with each article they published.

With claps as the main method of payment, each article was a silo.

You just needed to market it well enough to reach the engagement levels you wanted and move on. If you were writing in a profitable niche, great, but the smart play would be to write about whatever topics were trending at the time to capitalize on their popularity.

So, for example, if a fan was worth 50 cents, then you knew you’d need at least 100 fans to make $50 from each article you published. To maximize your chances of hitting those 100 fans, it made sense to write about what’s popular or trending.

You could get your 100 fans and move on.

I knew a few writers that operated that way. They wouldn’t post a new article until they’d reached their engagement metric on the current one.

Let’s Talk Influencers

The other aspect of the old clap system that’s lessened under the new read time metric is how much it promoted influencers and Cult of Personality fandom.

See, there’s a real first movers advantage to Medium.

If you were writing here in 2017, hell even as late as early 2019 before Medium went deep behind the paywall and curation (really) became the law of the land; you have some real advantages over those who were writing here much later.

With influencers, people are following them less because of the topics they cover and more because of what they represent. They are the embodiment of the success others are seeking, and people are going to clap for their work to be apart of that success, regardless of the topics the influencer covers. It has value because they wrote it.

It doesn’t mean people following influencers may not prefer one topic over the other, but it’s the person they are following, not so much what they’re writing about.

So influencers are almost guaranteed a base level of claps on each article before they’ve done any heavy marketing. Let’s say every time they hit publish, it’s (almost) guaranteed their article would have 30 fans. They’re already in pretty good shape to hit their goals before they start any serious marketing efforts.

Ultimately, people are following and clapping for the person, not so much the content. The new read time metric changes all of that.

Under the New System People Have To Invest In the Content

Under the new system, articles are no longer a silo.

You can’t just post anything, market it, and rack up your claps, set it aside and move on to the next article.

For you to have success, people have to really invest in what you’re writing and take the time to read it. Really read it, because this new system is catching the skimmers, and while you will earn from them, you won’t earn much.

You can’t quantify read time either like you could with fans and claps. Not really. You also won’t know how long someone spends reading your work until the average reading time shows up, and it takes at least 24-hours for that number to set.

It’s not like fans where you can immediately see how many people have clapped for your work and guess how much that is going to make you. You can’t even get a good guess on how much an hour of time is worth because it varies wildly.

So following trends alone is no longer as useful as it was. If someone has already read an article about — insert trend here — they have no reason to read your work. As a matter of fact, if you’re just writing about a little of this and a little of that, then they have no reason to seek your work out as they have no idea if you’re going to be writing about anything they want to read that day.

And unless you’re an amazing storyteller, no one cares about your family, your cat, your kids, or the bad day you’re having.

They care about one of two things:

1. Can you entertain them? I mean, really entertain them.
2. Can you help them achieve their goals or solve a problem they are trying to fix?

If you aren’t doing one of those two things (number two being the best), then you aren’t likely to get someone to stick around for even your 3-minute article.

The main reason I separated my content is that people who wanted to read my writing content probably weren’t really interested in my tips on how to give a good blow job and vice versa.

I knew I was trying to mesh two niches together that didn’t really go, I knew under this new system I’d likely be losing money since it operated on getting consistent eyes to my work, so I separated them.

Now I can hyper-focus my marketing efforts and build a tribe of people who are solely interested in what I’m writing. They aren’t there because they follow me per se, but because they know when they see my name on an article, it’s likely something they want to read since I’ve narrowed my focus.

Unlike the generalist, people know what they are going to get when they visit my profile. They know it’s going to be something writing or Medium related here or sex and relationship related over on Sex With T.S.

Sidenote: If you’re into the sexy stuff, go and follow me over there. It’s where all the action happens.

One More Time With the Influencers

For the influencer, this change could ultimately end up costing them money if they choose not to niche down. Now that reading is the metric that matters most if they don’t have a niche, they may find that some of their followers are less inclined to engage with everything they write about moving forward.

Maybe some readers really like their parenting content. Others may be really into their sex musings, but if the sex reader shows up on a day when the writer is writing about parenting, they may reflexively clap, but not read long enough to make the writer any (much) money.

With that said, first-mover advantage still matters to a point.

Being able to build a large audience on Medium before many of the current changes took effect matters and still has value. But moving forward, if they haven’t niched down and become the go-to person for a particular topic, they may see their income decline over time.

So What to Do Moving Forward?

Outside of figuring out who you are as a writer, you need to figure out what topics you want to cover as well. You can choose to write about what you want (always a bad strategy regardless of the payment system), but you aren’t likely to be rewarded for it all that much under this new system.

So here are some questions you need to answer when choosing a niche:

1. What can you write about day in and day out and enjoy?
2. What topics do you know well or are willing to research so you can be seen as an authority on the topic
3. Are 1 and 2 profitable niches in Medium’s ecosystem.

The sweet spot is to find a topic you are (or can be) an authority on and will also work well on Medium. This may mean your first topic of choice might not work, but your second or third one might.

You want to be known for something, whether it’s being the best knitter or the best programmer. You want readers to seek you out when they have a question about your particular niche before they look for answers elsewhere.

For example, if I want to know how to do something on Medium, I seek out Casey Botticello because I’m pretty sure he has a guide for that.

If I want to fulfill my voyeuristic tendencies, I go read Meaghan Ward’s SEXXX publication ’cause no one tells a sex tale quite like she does.

And if I’m looking for a recap or review of the latest tv show of film I go to Shain E. Thomas, M.Sc. profile because he reviews and recaps everything under the sun.

I don’t follow any of the above people because of their personality or their level of success on Medium. I follow them because they write amazing content on topics I’m trying to learn more about or that I enjoy reading.

You have to cultivate that level of loyalty with your potential readers, and the only way you do that is by having a niche. You may write a better Medium guide than Casey, but if you write about Medium one day, your cat the next, and all the ways you’re trying not to kill your teenager another day, I have no reason to find your Medium guide and read it, when I know I’ll find what I’m looking for with Casey.

So to wrap up this ridiculously long article:

1. Find a niche
2. Make sure it is a profitable one (look at the top topics on Medium as a place to start).
3. Start a publication. You need a place for people to access your work.
4. Profit (or begin to profit).

Seriously, change can be hard, especially when you’ve gotten used to a thing and even more so when you had success with it. Like it or not, this new MPP has changed everything, and those who are able to adapt and adjust will have the most success.

That adjustment process begins with having a niche. The sooner you make the change, the better and the sooner you’ll be able to reap the rewards of this new system that I think in the end can see more people making good money than in the previous one (poets aside).

This is How I Made $135 Dollars in My First 30 Days On Medium

Only seven to nine percent of writers make at least $100 each month on Medium. I did it in my first month. Here is what I did each week to achieve my goal, hopefully, you can use my journey to $100 a month to achieve yours.

If you enjoyed this case study check out my latest case study:

How to make $100 a week on Medium.