I'm Done Picking a Niche
Search the web for information on starting a blog or ask your favorite AI tool and you’ll find the same answer over and over: pick a niche.
That advice makes sense when you’re starting a new blog. Picking a niche narrows down what you write about, helps with SEO, and can give you a kickstart, if there’s an audience.
To me, it’s like telling someone who wants to get into running to start by participating in a marathon.
If you’ve never run before in your life, and you decide one day to run a marathon, you’re going to have a bad time. Instead, a runner improves by running lots of short runs, rather than reading about running technique.
Likewise, a writer improves by writing many short pieces rather than planning the perfect blog.
Before you spend hours researching a topic, finding a niche, and planning your first 10 articles, Just Write.
Chances are, no one is going to read your first article. Nor the second. Nor the third. But these are opportunities to improve your writing skills. You’ll learn how to structure your sentences and your posts and slowly lose the fear of hitting the publish button.
Best of all, you will find your voice, which makes your writing unique. Readers might come for the topic, but they’ll stay for you. You’ll start to figure out what you enjoy writing about and what makes you want to quit altogether.
I made this mistake when I started this blog. First, I was writing about design. Then, I was writing about the intersection between design and AI. Last time I revised my niche, I said it was building on the web in the era of AI.
The common thread among those? I was writing about what interested me at that moment. But picking a niche forced me to remain interested in that topic, even if it had stopped being interesting to me for a while.
Eventually, that would lead to me writing less.
Instead, I’m going to write for the sake of writing about whatever interests me in the moment. I’ll test things out, run experiments, and share them here. They will be tech-adjacent. If my hobbies have one thing in common it’s that they’re tech-related.
For now, I’m going to stop picking a niche.
Suggested reading
This article was inspired by the following articles. Worth checking them out if you’re interested in starting a blog or reviving one.