Day 36: finding my niche for writing

For the past few days, I have been worried about getting COVID because I was exhibiting flu-like symptoms. I finally found the energy to visit the GP near my place and he thinks it's probably just Upper Respiratory Tract Infection (URTI). I was also given 5 days medical certificate (MC) so I can rest up and let the medications do its work. Hopefully it will clear up and I can be sure I don't have COVID by then.



As usual, no matter how sick or troubled I am, I'm as good as my systems get. Here's my progress on building my systems today



1% Improvements Today

1. Day 3 of Product Building

   Shipped Login/Register mockup

   
   

2. Improve my Learning Process

   Researched Zettelkasten for Roam and took notes

   
   

3. Write Daily

   This post itself is progress!



Product Building & Figma Skills





Improving my Learning Process



Improving My Writing



My initial goal for writing a daily journal is to reflect daily. Now that I've built up the habit of writing consistently every day, I'm trying to stretch this further by writing to improve my writing.



Finding My Niche For Writing



I've been thinking a lot about growing an audience. So I did my research on how successful creators started out with building an audience. Most of them have a niche and a story to sell, which is something I haven't seriously considered yet. A few thoughts on building an audience courses through my mind:



1. What exactly do I have to attract an audience?

2. Do I really have anything to share that's worth anyone's attention?

3. Is the market size enough to attract a huge enough audience?

4. Can I ever monetize my audience base?

5. Is this something I want to do in the foreseeable medium to long term?



I intentionally numbered the questions because that's the exact sequence in which my thoughts flowed. They flow in that direction because they build on top of the answers to previous questions.



The first step to solving this dilemma then, is to answer the first question of “What exactly do I have to attract an audience?" This means I need a topic of sorts to write about right?



Ryan Robinson, a very successful blogger, suggests starting with a content strategy first [1]. His words has to mean something because he has an audience of 500K+ readers on his blog, and 24.1K followers on Twitter. He couldn't have gotten there by sheer luck with those numbers [2][3].



Here's what Ryan wrote about "what is a blog content strategy"





Here's some ideas on the topics that I see myself working on for the next few years:



• Community building, tools, etc [4]

• Learning how to learn – Roam Research, etc

• Building products?

• Growing an audience as I grow an audience – not sure if anyone has done this yet.



Over the next few days, I'll look at how I can incorporate these into a content strategy, as Ryan suggested in his blog post.