In biology class, you learn that every life form adopts a niche: a little role in some corner of the ecosystem, where it earns its daily bread by doing a rather specific thing.    

For example, the dung beetle collects animal poo, presumably because nobody else was already doing that, then rolls it into balls and lays its eggs inside of them, giving its larvae a handy source of nutrients.

The beaver gnaws at trees until they fall over, then drags the logs into piles. These piles dam streams and rivers, creating artificial ponds, which hide the beavers from predators and expand their access to food.

Squirrels, being better climbers than mice, once fed themselves by collecting seeds from hard-to-reach branches, and now specialize in stealing cherry tomatoes from my garden.

In blogging school, you learn the same principle: every little blog trying to make its way in the vast content ocean must establish itself in a niche. It needs to stake out a little corner of the action, a little field it can work, so to speak.

Primarily this means your website must be about something, such as car repair, wine, beard grooming, or celebrity gossip. That way, you can build an audience with similar problems and concerns, which you can then focus on helping them with, earning your living in the process. 

If you try to address everyone’s problems, you can’t compete with those who specialize. A site that posts about monster trucks, spreadsheets, fondue recipes, and backgammon will struggle to serve people who care about only one of those things, because to any given reader, most of the content is irrelevant. They’ll just go to Backgammon World or FondueFreaks instead.

This is why our dung beetle doesn’t try to collect all the types of food, because then it’s competing with every other food-enjoying creature. Instead, it specializes in the obscure food type “poo”, then gets very good at finding it and shaping it into balls. Thus the dung beetle has survived all these eons.

Choosing a niche was probably the first and best piece of blogging advice I ever received. Although it’s very practical, there’s a reason I haven’t taken it.

The Ten Thousand Things

“Getting better at being human” is one the broadest topics imaginable. Humans do all sorts of things. Getting better at cooking omelets, or lying on the couch, could certainly count as “getting better at being human,” as could learning to make friends as an adult, recognizing beauty in the mundane, coping with self-destructive tendencies, staying sane in the too-much-information age, and ten thousand other things.

Each of these concerns could be a niche one might specialize in. I could go all-in on mindfulness, or news addiction, or procrastination, build an audience that’s especially concerned with that thing, and serve them with helpful content and products.

I haven’t done this, and that’s because I’m interested in all those disparate topics precisely because of what unites them: they are all sub-concerns of the human condition.

We happen to be this tragically complex creature, this incredible rock star of the animal kingdom. The human being is so uniquely powerful and high-maintenance that it has trouble just managing its own thoughts and actions. I’ve developed some tricks for handling some of the ten thousand challenges arising from this fact, and that’s what Raptitude is about.

The human condition, looked at from the inside, is endlessly interesting to me. However, the diversity of topics that end up appearing on this blog makes for a very diverse audience, who read it for many different reasons. Ages range from teenager to octogenarian. Some are here for the experiments, some for specific ideas like the Depth Year, others for a sober take on mindfulness. Some come for my weird thought exercises, some for my tirades. Some people are here because I wrote about kettlebells fourteen years ago.

When I ask people why they subscribe to this site, trying to tease out common concerns I might help the readership with, they always say “I just like the way you think! Keep it up!” or “You say things I was thinking but didn’t know how to say.”

The ultimate result of this niche-resistant approach is an eclectic blog that can’t be monetized using the normal methods. I do release ebooks and courses, but they can only ever appeal to one particular subset of the audience, so my efforts are always split into projects that only serve a minority of the audience.

Typically, when you have traffic but no niche, as many of the more unusual creators do, you turn to the advertising approach. Instead of serving your readers, you serve advertisers by selling your readers’ attention to them.

I don’t want to do that. By this point in the internet’s history, most websites are encrusted with garish banner ads for mutual funds and software solutions, and it just never feels good.

There’s also Substack, the paid newsletter platform, but that’s a straight-up paywall approach, and that would be too drastic a change at this point.

A Non-traditional Approach

Thankfully, for the more eclectic, niche-defying members of the ecosystem, there’s now another option: the patronage model, exemplified by a platform called Patreon.

Bloggers and internet people all know what Patreon is, but I’m not sure if the general public does.

I wrote about Patreon in 2019 when I initially launched Raptitude’s page, but I haven’t really promoted it since.

Patreon is a platform that allows fans of a creator to become patrons of their work, like an old-timey patron of the arts, only on a smaller scale.

If you love what a creator is doing, or you want their work to be in the world, you can opt to make a small, regular contribution to the project, to ensure that it keeps going.

The level of contribution is up to the patron, usually just a few dollars. You can change or discontinue it at any time.

Patrons receive some perks. In Raptitude’s case, you gain immediate access to the Raptitude patron community, some behind-the-scenes updates from me, and a library of more than 50 extra posts never released on this site.

Some of the more popular ones:

There are additional rewards for people who make larger contributions. Most patrons just do it because they like Raptitude and want to support it.

I love this model because it frees both reader and creator from the indignity of banner ads and sponsored content. The work gets supported by those who are able and willing, but the writing remains free and uncompromised by third parties.

A few hundred people have been supporting Raptitude in this way since 2019, and without them, it would not be here today. It’s harder than ever to make a high-traffic website self-sustaining if you don’t orient the whole thing towards marketing.

Currently only about 1% of Raptitude’s subscribers are patrons. They make it free for everyone else.

By promoting the Patreon more often, I would like to get that ratio to 2%. This would free up a tremendous amount of time and allow me to make more stuff for you.

You can check out the benefits of becoming a patron on my creator page.

I visit and enjoy many websites every week, and I don’t worry too much about what keeps them going. But for a few favorite creators, whose minds seem uncannily like my own, I dedicate a small amount for direct support. It feels good.

If Raptitude is that kind of site for you, great. If not, that’s okay too. Either way, thank you so much for reading and sharing this blog all these years.

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Beetle photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann. Cat photo by Andrew Cornell.