What Happens When Your Niche Goes Dry?
Asking for a…me. I’m asking for me.
Bottom line upfront: I’m hoping to start a conversation around this issue, as I truly don’t know where to go from here. Feel free to comment on your ideas and experiences with niching yourselves into oblivion. PLEASE.
Backstory
My writing journey started out innocently enough. I had just discharged from the U.S. Army four months earlier and I simply needed a job. Being the creative problem solver I am, I turned to…the Army.
Getting out was a mistake. Weirdly, so was staying in just a few months before all this, but those few months were scary and confusing and I turned around and dove right back into the only pool I really knew before my clothes were even dry.
Turned out, the only bonus-incentivized job available at that particular recruiting station that month was journalism. I’d been a disc jockey and morning show host in terrestrial radio for a while in a previous life, and I’d watched Good Morning Vietnam a few times, so I figured, “What the hell?”
Who knew real life was not like the movies? My only two choices in journalism were writing and photography on the one hand, and videography on the other. I chose writing because it seemed like the easier of the two options. After twelve weeks of journalism school, I returned home to a set of orders. Iraq. Again.
You can find the full story on all that here.
I’ve been writing for newspapers, blogs, freelance platforms, etc. ever since. The early days of going into business for myself were hard, as I was just scattershot with my focus.
“Get a niche!” they all said.
Easier said than done, though, right?
I got a niche
After fumbling around for a couple of years, writing about whatever flew out of my brain, I began to notice that only certain pieces were getting any traction.
Divorce, mostly. Out of pure frustration last year, I posted an article on how second and third (and fourth) marriages are even more likely to fail than first ones. For several months, it went nowhere.
And then suddenly, one day, it did. I don’t know what “viral” means in the context of this platform, but this thing went nutso for several months. It wasn’t just the reads and views, either. There was real reader engagement with the piece. I actually made some real money on it, too.
I still have no clue why a several-month-old article suddenly took off.
My next successful piece was also about divorce, only this time it was more personal. I wrote about going through one during my first deployment to Iraq, and it also took off with reader engagement and sent some decent money to my kids’ college funds.
After these articles hit big here, I was approached by a completely different online platform about cross-publishing them. And they wanted to pay me to keep writing for them — as long as I was willing to keep talking about divorce.
The Well Ran Dry
I’ve been through more than one failed marriage. I’ve written about this topic several times, both from a personal and from an academic standpoint. I’m out of words about this, which means my niche is dead.
I don’t know where else to go with my writing career now that I’ve spent myself on one topic for so long that I have nothing else to say about it.
So what do I do? What would you do if you reached the tail end of a topic that you consider yourself an expert in? If you suddenly discovered that you can’t get anyone interested in anything else?
Frank Vaughn is a regional Emmy and Associated Press Media Editors Award-winning journalist from Little Rock, Ark. He is a graduate of Ouachita Baptist University in Arkansas with a degree in Speech Communication, and the Defense Information School at Fort Meade, Md., with an emphasis in journalism and media relations.
