A lot of people don’t ask me about starting a blog. They don’t ask “Ryan, I want to start writing, but I don’t know what to write about.” It’s unfortunate because I know exactly how they can find what they should be writing about. It’s a two-step process.
Step 1: Go Big to go Small (a.k.a. Broad to Narrow)
When I imagine people asking me about what to write it goes something like this “Ryan, everyone on the internet says I need to pick a topic to focus on, BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO PICK!!! :~|
The prevailing advice is that if you don’t have a niche, you will be banished from the internet. This creates niche stress.
The solution to niche stress is to forget about the idea that you need to focus or have a niche. Once you start writing, you will gain perspective on what you like to write about. With 10, 20, or 30 posts under your belt, you will start to see a pattern of what you enjoy, or what people like, or where you have a unique perspective.
This is how you figure out what you like to write about, by writing.
As a human being your interests, change with your mood. Some days you like to write about food, some days travel, some days politics, some days philosophy. From your perspective, these seem like completely different topics. But, what we can’t see from our point of view is how much of ourselves we bring to any topic or how the many different and random interests from our perspective actually look topical and niche from the outside. The broad range of your interests is largely an illusion because you don’t think about how many interests there actually are.
You don’t need to pick a topic before you start writing. You don’t need to figure out who you are to begin to write, but you can write to figure out who you are.
Step Two: Go Small to Go Big
Once you have spent a while writing you have a better understanding of what you like to write about.
As a new writer building an audience and authority on a subject, it is helpful to focus in on a couple of subjects. This is where the common advice applies. But it only applies after you have started. It is not something to stress about before starting.
For me, step two was picking the intersection of philosophy and travel. The podcast we create is anchored around travel. We can bring in a variety of topics, but it can’t stray too much from the anchor theme.
This allows more people to find us. We have compiled a lot of content about travel, so when people are looking for a podcast about travel they can quickly run across ours.
On this blog, however, I write about whatever I want to write about. I have chosen to ignore step two when it comes to my writing here because I want to keep diving into new areas and getting out of my comfort zone. There are subjects I am learning about that I want to write about, but I still feel unconfident in those areas. I don’t want to close myself off to writing about economics, or marketing, or writing advice 🙂 so I continue not to choose topics for myself and to forge my own niche.
Being unspecific has so far worked out well for me. I have managed not to be banished from the internet, which allows me to continue to write advice to questions that people don’t ask me.
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