Week 1 Follow-up: General vs Niche Writing Challenge

My stats and results from week 1 of a pseudo experiment testing niche writing vs generalist writing on Medium

This is the first week’s wrapup of my current pseudo experiment to compare niche writing to generalist writing on Medium. For those curious, the idea came up as a counter to other Medium writers’ stance that creators on Medium can only succeed by writing in a specific niche, after the recent payment method changes.

Below are the two original stories:

Week 1 performance

I’ll confess that this first week I didn’t completely stick to my own rules of engagement. I had taken a 10-day workcation in Singapore that quickly turned into more of a vacation, so my productivity wasn’t exactly where I wanted it to be.

That being said, I managed to write a decent amount in the previous 7 days comprising the 1st week. I went a bit writer-crazy on the topic of Medium as I had been compiling some data for a while and felt like getting it out there.

I did manage to write the 3 new niche articles, as well as one other besides Medium as a topic for non-niche.

Non-niche:

1. https://readmedium.com/how-to-pick-a-blogging-niche-on-medium-531c1627d494
2. https://readmedium.com/the-wannabe-super-capitalistic-paradise-island-that-was-never-built-yet-a34cb55bb3ad
3. https://readmedium.com/list-of-medium-top-writer-tags-number-of-hits-and-amount-of-writers-34ce3f4234a6
4. https://readmedium.com/finding-a-niche-on-medium-instead-of-writing-about-many-topics-69d204f19c55
5. https://readmedium.com/the-new-medium-partner-program-might-have-a-surprise-for-us-later-a00e0baabf60
6. https://readmedium.com/goal-achieved-1000-followers-on-medium-in-6-weeks-cc59cf71bd35
7. https://readmedium.com/newb-friendly-medium-publications-to-get-published-in-e510cf849f6

Niche (the topic of mindfulness and related subjects):

1. https://readmedium.com/why-is-there-a-stigma-about-men-practicing-yoga-68873ac18e39
2. https://readmedium.com/walking-as-a-form-of-mindfulness-and-relief-dbbc45c3eb6c
3. https://readmedium.com/thinking-about-how-you-think-dispositional-mindfulness-42ae201fc0f4

Summary of results

I achieved record highs in views on my stuff!

Fortunately and unfortunately, it was only for a couple of the articles I wrote about on the subject of Medium.

Fortunately because, hey, views!

Unfortunately, because my other work had abysmal results.

Here are the results, based on most recent for each topic:

Takeaways from week 1

1. Medium seems to have inadvertently become one of my niches (after 6 weeks on the subject sporadically)
2. It would probably take a lot longer than this 4-week pseudo experiment to properly form a niche
3. The stats aren’t equal — Something published yesterday vs a week ago will have a different amount of views automatically

Next 3 weeks

1. I’ll be publishing everything in Med Daily for the rest of the 3 weeks to keep things more equal (and to help spread the word of T.S. Johnson’s author-helping publication!)
2. I’ll write more varied work for my non-niche articles (I have a list in my phone of 150 different rambled thoughts for specific topics to write about)
3. I will follow only people that resonate with mindfulness for the next 3 weeks (as part of this strategy) to give a boost on the niche side

Thanks for reading, hopefully, we’ll get some more interesting results by the end of the 4 weeks!

‘Rant’ over.

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