Blogging “Wisdom” Project Re-Introduction
On April 27, 2026, I commemorated The New Leaf Journal’s sixth birthday by announcing a six-part project where I would share “wisdom” that I have accrued from six years of running and writing for this humble online writing magazine. I began the series on May 2 with my thoughts on Some Benefits of Blogging and Writing Online. That article explored some general reasons why someone may want to start a blog or online writing website, regardless of what he or she writes about. Left unanswered in that first article, however, was how to come up with topics to write about. One reason I did not seek to tell readers what they should write about is because there is any number of topics that one could write about, as I am wont to demonstrating in the web pages of this humble online writing magazine. But upon reflection, and with the benefit of the links from the web, I found an angle to approach how to come up with a general topical concept for a blog or writing website.
Introducing The “Niche” Question
I recently saved a blog post by Robert Birming titled How to kill a blog. The post lives up to the promise of the headline:
What can you do to prolong its life? It’s very simple. Don’t go niche. Blog about whatever you feel like. Some posts get more attention than others. It’s not important.
Before continuing, some context is warranted. My impression from having read the post (which I encourage you to read too) is that Mr. Birming is most concerned with providing counsel to people who are getting started with a blog or considering taking up blogging. But more generally, he frames his anti-niche advice for those who “want to avoid ending up at the blog cemetery.” For those bloggers on the border between life and death, he stated that “[a]s soon as you start limiting yourself, trying to trend, you’ve got one foot in the grave.” To be sure, I have come across many blogs which began with a flurry of posts and then exist only as memorials to the fleeting enthusiasm of the beginning blogger.
Regular readers of The New Leaf Journal will know that I run this site in perfect accord with Mr. Birming’s recommended method of blogging. See, for example, the seven articles on a wide variety of topics that I published in a two-week period in February 2026, recapped in Incredible Article Variety on NLJ. Because I run The New Leaf Journal as a hobby project, I am inclined to write about what interests me at the time and in the manner of my choosing. This is simply my preference rather than a strategic decision. With that being said, I like to think it makes the site more interesting to a broader range of readers. Two people could have me in their feed collections but almost never read the same articles. There is something for everyone (or so I tell myself). I referenced my “variety hour” approach to writing online when I chose our site slogan, “Where the leaves are perennially virid.” The New Leaf Journal may cover many unrelated topics, but I approach every article with the intention of writing something that will be worth the time it takes to read by someone who is interested.
Based on the foregoing, one may assume that my sentiments on “niche” blogging are fully in accord with those of Mr. Birming. However, this is not quite the case, at least insofar as I understand Mr. Birming’s argument. I agree fully that anyone who advises prospective bloggers and internet writers that they must have a niche is peddling bad advice. But I do not think it is the case that going niche, or perhaps better-put here, starting niche, is necessarily the path to blog death. Let us take a brief-but-relevant digression to understand why.
Successful Blogs and the True Blogger
In my first entry in the blogging wisdom series, I devoted a section of my article to one part of Jeff Starr’s The Pros and Cons of Blogging, wherein he offered his own replies to common concerns about starting a blog seen around the web.
Mr. Starr, who I will note blogs primarily – albeit not exclusively – about WordPress development and tech subjects, offered his response to the general internet take on blogging that “[t]o be successful, you have to blog about popular topics”:
[P]opularity is not synonymous with success. Blogs that are popular have managed to appeal to the mainstream mentality, but are far from successful on many other levels. Originality, sincerity, authenticity, and truthfulness are just a handful of the different measures of a blog’s success. You don’t have to be like everyone else — dare to be different. If you are blogging to make money, then you have already missed the boat. True blogging is about expression, humanity, experience, and community. There is nothing worse than knock-off copycat-blogs echoing the latest trendy gossip just to earn a few dollars through advertising.
There may be cases where “popularity” or some sort of metric such as impressions or ad and affiliate clicks is synonymous with success. But I am sharing my wisdom about running an independent online writing magazine featuring writing for human readers. For someone who is primarily interested in sharing his or her writing online both for his or her own benefit and in the hope that web surfers may find it pleasant or useful, I agree in full with Mr. Starr that “popularity is not synonymous with success.” Similarly, I agree that trying to “appeal to the mainstream mentality,” as Mr. Starr puts it, or “trying to trend,” as Mr. Birming described it, is not a well-conceived end of a blog or of the sorts of independent writing websites that we are concerned with here. “Trending” is a distinctly social media concept, and those who are seeking to trend would generally be better served trying to create content for the algorithms to deliver to users on social media platforms. The blogger or artisianl internet writer should be wary of thinking in terms of ‘content’ and “users.” Posting good writing and media is distinct from being an amorphous influencer.
Mr. Starr offers a different way to think of what it means to be a successful blogger or internet writer. “Originality, sincerity, authenticity, and truthfulness are just a handful of the different measures of a blog’s success.”
Speaking for myself, I appreciate most the articles and blog posts that make me stop, think, and approach an issue or question in a different way than I would have without the benefit of having read something insightful. There are many articles and blog posts that I find largely agreeable, but ultimately gloss over because they lack the originality that makes other articles and posts stand out to me.
Over the years, I have developed my thoughts on writing with “sincerity” and “authenticity,” although I do not recall having framed my own essays in those specific terms. Back in 2024, I encouraged bloggers and writers similarly situated to me to write humanely, by which I meant “[y]ou, a human being, are creating something from your own perspective for other human beings.” Left unsaid, but implied, is that both sincerity and authenticity should be understood to be at the core of writing meaningful words and creating meaningful media for the enjoyment of human readers and viewers. In that article, I was writing about a way of thinking about writing in our current generative AI moment. However, as I subsequently opined in The Positive Case for Good Tech, the case for blogging and writing well does not need a big tech antagonist. The measures of success listed by Mr. Starr would have been just as instructive to a blogger setting up shop in 1999 before big tech centralized social media, search engine optimization spam, and generative AI were dominating the common internet experience.
Building on the foregoing paragraph, I quote from Joshua Blais’ Using the internet like it’s 1999:
Authenticity is in short supply and seems to be the only way forward, for so much of what we see is manufactured, tailored, and designed to show something that doesn’t exist. Imperfection is the mark of the human, the spelling mistakes, the last minute word addition because you misspoke on a video, it’s all more real because of this. We can strive to glorify the Creator with creation, and that will always be more enjoyable than the sterile veil over what could be authentic.
Here, Mr. Blais proposed “authenticity” as the way forward in a world where much of the popular “content” on the internet is created for algorithms, consumers, and users rather than human readers and viewers looking for something pleasant or useful to take in and consider. “We can strive to glorify the Creator with creation, and that will always be more enjoyable than the sterile veil over what could be authentic” is much in accord with my practical case against modifying one’s own writing to avoid being accused of being a large language model: “The way to convince people that human writing is worth reading is to write well and in one’s own voice—a principle which applies to other forms of art.”
Mr. Starr defined “true blogging” as being “about expression, humanity, experience, and community.” I like the phrase “true blogging,” notwithstanding that I maintain The New Leaf Journal is an online writing magazine and I am a writer (in addition to being site administrator and editor, of course). An interesting blog, writing website, or article on the internet (regardless of whether that article is on a “blog” or larger project) should feature Mr. Starr’s hallmarks of true blogging. Speaking for myself, I focus on expressing my ideas clearly – that is thinking them through clearly and trying to convey those thoughts through clear writing. As I noted above, I write as a human being for other human beings. My articles and posts are grounded in my own experiences and reading, as I detailed in Some Benefits of Blogging. Finally, while I am not a part of any specific internet “community,” I work to make The New Leaf Journal a good citizen of the web by linking to and engaging with other interesting articles and posts (see for example how I am writing this article).
I turn again to Mr. Blais to further develop the “humanity” and “experience” principles of Mr. Starr’s “true blogging” concept:
We have been conditioned to identify with the things we have rather than become the person we ultimately see ourselves to be simply because it is easier to be a guy with a beard that likes coffee and Marvel movies than it is to become a man of fortitude and resilience.
Regardless of whether one blogs about a seemingly random assortment of topics or confines his or her blogging interests to a narrower selection of topic areas, an individual aspiring to be a “true blogger” will most likely focus on subjects that interest him or her. Mr. Blais notes a subtle but important point for the “true blogger” to bear in mind. There is a distinction between being a person with interests and a person defined by interests. The latter affliction – collecting interests as if they were Pokemon cards and displaying them in a proverbial binder – is common among those on social media and dating sites or preparing college applications. Sticking with Mr. Blais’ example, it would be more interesting to read a blog post about coffee written by someone who has a passion for and knowledge about coffee and wants to share that interest with readers than someone who wants to be known as the “coffee guy” because he or she likes coffee. The true blogger is not the amalgamation of interests, but a human being with sincere and authentic thoughts about his or her interests, grounded in some sort of relevant experience.
Before we come full circle, I quote Herbert Lui from Don’t become a content machine:
If there ever was a piece of advice that’s well suited for every creator and artist, it’s the need to stay consistent with your creative practice; if you hate what you’re doing, there’s only so much you can force yourself to do before your dislike for the process shows in your work.
The true blogger should be true to him or herself. Being interested in what one is writing should show in the final product. Forcing oneself into a niche or paradigm for some external reason will lead to “your dislike for the process” showing in the final product.
A Niche Answer to the Niche Question: It Depends
With our background work done, I offer my qualified concurrence with Mr. Birming’s anti-niche take.
Bloggers and writers should consider what they are interested in thinking and writing about and then sharing in the context of writing on the internet. Some people may choose a path similar to mine and have an open door policy for new ideas and sources of inspiration to wander into the writing den. Others may have a specific area or areas that they are interested in pondering and writing about while not being interested in venturing outside that limited scope in the context of one project or another. Some bloggers or writers may have no designs on popularity whatsoever and may instead opt for a personal niche such as an online diary or journal.
In a vacuum, all of the approaches I described above are workable, none of them are necessarily correlate to a blog’s lifespan.
Through my feed-reader, I follow many blogs, personal writing websites, and authors who have a niche — and many of them have been at it for some time. As I noted, Jeff Starr focuses primarily on WordPress and web development on his long-running Perishable Press blog. Takafumi at Please, No Hate focuses almost exclusively on anime and Japanese video games, light novels, and manga. Grough Lui’s Grough’s Tech Zone consists primarily of his reviews of tech products. Roger Pearse combines a small number of diary posts with many posts about classical antiquity, with an emphasis on translations of ancient works. For whatever it is worth, I will note that Mr. Birming himself blogs more about blogging than I focus on any single topic. Depending on how one defines niche, I suppose that all of these blogs could be classified as niche in some respect, and all have been around for a while and will likely be around for years to come.
The question as I see it is less niche vs generalist and more what is best for the individual blogger or internet writer. There are several topics that I cover on New Leaf Journal that I could turn into a niche blog that I could keep going without losing interest, but I have more than enough to write about that I prefer my “variety hour” approach to writing online. Why should I restrict myself to visual novels, NBA history, U.S. immigration law, or the sights and sounds of Brooklyn, New York City, when I can write about all these things and more? Because I had no good answer to that question, I decided that my only niche would be the me niche. But someone else with those same interests may only be interested in sharing his or her thoughts on visual novels or life in Brooklyn, while leaving the other interests to pursue offline. That person may in fact find it harder to maintain an everything blog and be less likely to stick with such a project.
Where I agree with Mr. Birming in full is his position that one should not force him or herself to go niche due to some external reason, such as a mistaken believe that blogs are supposed to be niche or that going niche is a path to popularity. One of the best parts of having a digital home is that the digital homeowner can furnish his home as he or she pleases. Having a blog or writing website gives one the freedom to choose how he or she approaches it and how it evolves so as to share his or her authentically human thoughts and ideas. Prospective bloggers and writers should have no illusions about there being some certain path to popularity (unless they are already have a committed following, of course). What the search engines and algorithms give one day, they may take the next. For every “successful” (in terms of popularity) blog or writing website in a niche, there are many that have garnered much less attention. To be sure, some topics are more likely to catch on than others, but the true blogger should focus first and foremost on writing about things he or she can cover with authenticity and sincerity and doing so for an audience of interested human readers who may be looking for something pleasant and useful on the subject.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, I was unable to tell any prospective or current bloggers which topic(s) they should write about. However, through studying interesting thoughts from bloggers and writers around the web in light of my six years of experience running The New Leaf Journal, I think, or at least hope, we came away with some interesting ways to think about how a blogger or internet writer should think about deciding what to write about.
