Creator Habits Podcast: To Niche or Not to Niche? A Conversation with Jerine Nicole, The Multipassionate Creator
This week's episode features Medium writer Jerine Nicole and her take on niching down when you're starting out as a creator
Every other week we feature highlights from our podcast, which covers more tactical insights on setting up your habits as a creator.
This week’s podcast episode features emerging creator Jerine Nicole, as she talks about creating your niche, setting up writing habits, and getting featured in publications. This episode is great for aspiring writers still working out what they want to be known for!
To listen to the full episode:
About Jerine Nicole
Jerine Nicole is known as the multipassionate creator. During the day she works as an Emergency Nurse, but has grown her following moonlighting as a writer. She started her content journey in October 2020 and quickly grew out her audience on Medium, where she contributes to multiple publications on the topics of personal development, the creator economy and entrepreneurship.
Excerpts From The Podcast
On Creating Your Niche
I tried the niching down path at the very beginning of my journey when I wanted to become an online coach, but I liked writing about mindset, personal development, travel. I couldn't fit myself in one industry.
So I just said, you know what, instead of niching down, I'm just going to let myself be and explore all my interests because I don't have a following. I have the advantage of really figuring out what I like. And it was a great decision because I started to focus on the intersection of what people wanted to hear from me.
On Finding The Intersection Between What You Like & What Others Want
I started tracking all the topics that I wrote about in an Excel sheet. Later I transferred it onto Notion, but basically every time I posted, I would add a category describing what the post was about and how I liked writing it. And then over time, after a month or so, I would look at the data to see the intersection of what I liked talking about and how the post did in terms of views.
On Creating A Writing Routine
I know it's overrated to say habits and routines and all of that, but in reality, routines just really force you to keep going without you having to decide whether you want to write this morning or not.
[But before I established a routine], first I had to decide, do I want to take this seriously?
Because I already had a routine of waking up and doing yoga, I added writing. These became my keystone habits. So I wake up, do yoga and then just write for like an hour. And then I go about my day. That means my day has been accomplished because I did the most important thing I wanted to do, which is writing.
On Finding Your Medium
I actually tried writing last. First, I dove into Instagram. I did not like it. I just really hated it. And then I tried taking YouTube seriously. So I filmed about eight videos, but only uploaded two. It was basically like a trial process to see: how did I feel about doing that? I was always gathering my own feedback as I was trying things out.
When I started writing on Medium, I realized that: oh, I really liked this. When I'm writing, it feels like I'm in my flow state. That's kind of when I decided I needed to take writing more seriously and cultivate it.
On Roadblocks To Publishing
My biggest roadblock to publishing is editing.
It's just tedious work to do because it takes longer than writing. Writing takes about an hour. You're just dumping words out there, but then editing, you kind of have to summon a different persona to ask, is this good for the reader? Are they going to like it?
Editing is a different kind of art, because you're trying to analyze from a reader's perspective, and just cutting out about 20% of what you initially wrote and then making it pretty, making it readable, making it engaging, which is obviously much harder than just writing it.
On Recognizing Sources For Ideas
A lot of my ideas come from conversations with friends. When I'm actually giving them advice, I think “oh, who else could be wondering about this?”
For example, a friend will say, “oh, I'm not good at writing blog posts.” And then I’ll ask them, well, why do you think that? And for most of their answers, I’ll respond, no, those are all misconceptions.
So now I have an article idea called “The misconceptions about writing blog posts.”
On Defining Consistency
I don't try to publish every day (except for the 30 day writing challenge I did). But I do write everyday. Even if I have 50 words on my notepad, I consider that writing. I don't even have to be on my computer.
I don’t have a definition where I continuously publish but where I do continuously write, which is just a nicer way to treat yourself when you're actually building something for the long run.
On Growing As A Medium Writer / Getting Featured
At the very beginning, I tried applying to Medium publications, got a lot of rejections, and got discouraged.
But after a while I realized that if they're rejecting me, that means they're looking for higher quality writing. So I took my time to study what the publications wanted and the content they featured.
Then I reframed how I thought about it. Initially I though “I want this publication to accept me.” And then I switched to deciding, I’m going to write my story first. And then I’ll pick the publication for my words, like the home for my words.
And I studied those publications to understand what they considered high quality articles and then started pitching.
So now I have a 90% acceptance rate and barely get rejected. It’s a combination of picking the right publications and understanding what they consider quality.
On Finding Mentors
Instead of learning from 10 different people and having them all say conflicting things, I chose one unofficial writing mentor, because his work on Medium really resonated with me.
There are other creators that I admire when it comes to writing online, but the reason I liked Nicolas Cole is because the types of stories he writes are the kinds of stories I would like to write.
I think it's important to know the type of person you are and the type of work you want to produce and follow people who are on that same track. It actually doesn't matter what creator you pick to follow, because they are all successful in their own way and they make it work for them.
Thanks for subscribing to another edition of Creator Habits! If you have any thoughts, feedback, or guests you want featured in future episodes of the podcast, feel free to send me a message!