Student Blog Tips For Economics, Computer Science and Literature Bloggers

End of summer means only one thing to parents, school children, and students: summer break is no more, and it’s time to get back to reality and start conquering another year in school. Even though school obligations don’t leave a whole lot of free time for students everywhere, one of the best things you could do to improve yourself while you’re taking a break from studying, to improve your future career even before it starts, is to try – and start a student blog!

‘But blogging is so 1999. I tweet, snap, even post myself on Musically!’ – I hear you say.

While that might be true (and good for you), blogging is still the best way to position yourself as a young professional ahead of a great career. While just blogging and practicing won’t make you an expert (studies have proven Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that 10.000 of practice can turn anyone into an expert – false!), it will help you get one step ahead of your peers, establishing a personal brand that will help you land or start your own job!

It’s About You AND Your Readers

There’s a lot of advice around the web when it comes to how to blog, but even when you find the time and realize you can blog, what then? There’s just not enough advice that suggests topics to blog about. This can prove a bit challenging, especially if you’re a student and don’t think that you have anything to offer to the internet audiences, but take a minute and think:

If marketers blog about marketing, artists blog about design, why wouldn’t a student blog about what he/she is familiar with from school, college, as well as everything learned from practice (and the web).

At first, you might think that just blogging about what interests you is the right way to go, but you need to think about your readers, the ‘customers’ of your articles. Thankfully, we’ve already established that you’re a student.

How does being a student help?

If you’re having trouble deciding who you’re going to write for, fear not. More than half blog readers are between 21 and 35 years of age, which puts you as a student, right in that demographic. As a student – you know how more than half of blog readers think and what they want.

So, what to write about? We’ll look at 3 examples from 3 fields that you might be studying – to give you an idea on what you can blog about:

1. Youth Marketing By Young Marketeers (You)

Let’s say you’re studying to be a marketing professional, and you are pretty good at school and have done your research. You know that having a blog will get you better job opportunities, but you don’t know where to start.

The key here is to help other people see things from your point of view.

There’s not a lot of places online where you can see and hear a student’s idea of what marketing should look like. While some might stick to SEO and even TV ads, why wouldn’t you inform both your peers and other marketers in new channels available to reach your target group, such as Snapchat? For example, why not write about the tactics that marketers use to convert younger people to their brands: youth marketing.

While other marketers could write about Snapchat and similar platforms in a classic “marketing” way, most of them are too old to write from a student’s perspective, and as Steven Bradley writes in the context of design; perspective is important:

What we can and should do is gain a better understanding of the context visitors will bring and specifically design a site for their perspective and taste. Still any aesthetic treatment is going turn some away.

For example, the first post on your new blog could be about youth marketing in general. You should aim to discover what  that makes a certain brand interesting and popular with younger audiences, and write about the techniques they used to achieve this, akin to a case study.

Your background in marketing and the fact that you’re a young adult too can only be a winning combination for you.

Here are just a few examples of posts are all both simple and interesting, and you should look them up if you’re looking for a general direction for your blog:

• How Can Brands Appeal To Millennials This Summer – A Complete Guide;
• What Can We Learn From Nike’s Just Do It Campaign In 2016;
• How I Feel About Millennials That Blog;
• …

Blogs such as Immersive Youth and Ypulse have already shown how to blog as a student, and we can’t wait to read about your internet marketing blog on the top of Inbound.org!

2. More On The Dev Side? Write About It!

You can organize your posting schedule by using Google Calendar and Sheets, and can even use apps like Forest to keep you focused on your writing. Woohoo, tech! But what if you aren’t somebody that loves marketing and advertising? What if you actually study something more related to the technological side of things, like programming and development?

While most will agree that you don’t NEED to finish college to be a successful developer, it’s still one of the top paying jobs you can get out of college, easily earning you more than $84,000.

At least setting up your custom domain name and WordPress website won’t be hard. You’ll probably end up setting up your own server because you’re mates with a sysadmin! While there are a lot of ‘tech blogs’ out there these days that cover hardware reviews as well as apps, starting the next Gizmodo has been done to death.

Instead, as a developer, you should look up to established developer bloggers who created their personal brands on the back of their popular blogs, such as Joel Spolsky with his Joelonsoftware blog! Because who else but a developer would blog about blogging like Joel does in his 2014 post:

Want to hear something funny? The only way I can post blog posts is by remote-desktopping into a carefully preserved Windows 7 machine which we keep in a server closet running a bizarrely messed-up old copy of CityDesk which I somehow hacked together and which only runs on that particular machine. The shame!

While you might not be Joel, you can write about the good and bad sides of learning a particular programming language, inspiring others to try it out. You might even end up making a few commits on Github! This way you’re staying in your field but are also teaching and learning at the same time. Batch blogging, right?

Some other topics you can write about as a computer science student:

• How To Develop Apps While Developing Yourself – an advice column from your own personal experience;
• How Much Free Time Do You Need To Create Apps – a weekly roundup of the apps you’re working on, and how much time does it take to program each part of them;
• Front vs. Back End – What’s the difference?
• Ruby on Rails For N00bs: Easy to Understand, Very Powerful – news from the tech world incorporated in your own personal style of writing

Considering that development and programming moves so fast, you’re never going to have trouble finding new and interesting topics, and your blog can also serve as a real-life showcase of the things you know, something like a portfolio. If you want to get hired, your blog will surely tell a lot about you, and let potential employers see that you can both make an app and write about it, too.

3. Not A Tech Junkie? How About Books?

This is all well, you say. But what if you’re not studying anything related to technology? What to blog about when your field of study is, for example, literature?

Ah, humanities. Don’t worry, we have you as well as STEM covered!

Truth be told, it’s best if you find a niche that is not that well known while still being specific, something not a lot of people blog about but is a gold mine for those who do. Dozens of experts have their own idea on how to choose your topic, but if you’re into literature, you could literally make a ton of blog posts by exploring a niche that is close to the general audience for them to read it, but also far enough that they aren’t oversaturated with it every day.

• Same Book, Different Era – a comparison article about books that are similar in topic but are made in different eras;
• Why Read This? – a showcase article about lesser-known books;
• Write Me a Story – a daily blog depicting the way you create stories for your blog. So meta!
• …

If finding that one thing (like perhaps 20th century horror novels) doesn’t work, why not blog about the car culture in literature? I’d sure love to read about that. Your advantage as a write will definitely be that not a lot of your peers are truly following the blogging advice in order to differentiate themselves like the likes of Carribean Book Blog or Goins, Writer.

But Isn’t Sticking To Just One Niche Too… Niche?

One more thing, that can relate to any and all blog posts you write. You NEED to be passionate about the thing you’re writing about for it to be both fulfilling and high-quality in the long run. That’s why a niche can help you a lot in the long run, simply because it’s about something you know, love and have a deep connection to.

As a student, you can explore a niche in detail and become an expert in it, just like this infographic based on man’s best friend shows:

Less competition in your niche – and you’re also writing from the unique perspective of a student? Win!

Lots of Ideas, But One Real Student Blog Focus

So now you have… too many ideas?

What happens when you have a ton of ideas in your head, ranging from development to cars and marketing, and are passionate about a lot of topics, while still being a student? Focus on the topic you chose. Entrepreneur’s journey  Yaro Starak advises you to take a trial period of around 3 months, and see where you are after that time. If you’re going steady in a good direction, you have yourself a blog, and if you aren’t you can still shift course or pivot.

Heeding this simple advice will see you transform your student life into a life of blogging success, and with a little luck and a great niche you’re on your way to becoming a full-fledged blogger in no time!

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