Is science one of your true passions? Do you read all you can from scientific journals and wish you could contribute your own knowledge to something substantive people could benefit from? Do you enjoy writing?
Are you looking for a way to make some extra money through a hobby? If the answer to these questions is yes, one thing you should certainly consider doing is starting your own science blog. Learning how to start a science blog can allow you to share your passion for the scientific world with others.
Below are some tips on whether or not starting a science blog would be a good idea for you and how to go about starting one if you decide yes.
Do You Have a Goal for Your Science Blog?
Blogging can be a time consuming activity. You don’t want to just waste all your time on an online project like that if you don’t have any real direction for where you want to take it. Consider exactly what you want to do with your science blog and why.
For example, many people start science blogs as a way to document the research they are performing to obtain their PhD. Others may want to start an actual scientific writing career and need some practice. Certain bloggers may want to make some extra money via click-through advertising and science related product placement. You may also just love science and want to entertain others with your knowledge of amazing facts.
There are many different options. However, overall, your blog needs a goal of some kind of make it a worthwhile endeavor. Make sure that goal is worth your time and effort.
Determine Who Your Audience Is
The second important element of a blog beyond the author is the audience. There isn’t much point in creating a blog if you don’t have an actual audience. An audience of your self would be quite boring. You may as well write a personal journal that point.
Thankfully, there are many different possibilities for science blog’s audience. For example, if you are writing the blog for a class or college course, your intended audience would be your teacher, professor or fellow students.
Alternatively, you may seek out other scientists to share your research with. In many cases, however, you may end up with an audience of laypeople. In that is the case, you should try to keep your blog interesting for those non-experts. Science is exciting, and it has a lot to offer from an interest or even a comedy perspective.
Choose the Right Blogging Platform for Your Science Blog
Once you know why you will be blogging and for which audience, you should go about setting up your blog. Thankfully, learning the technical process of how to start a science blog is rather simple these days. Most of the hard work has been done for you. You can simply sign-up on a blogging platform like Dreamwdith or Tumblr and begin making blog posts immediately.
In other cases, you may not want to use an existing service. Instead, you may want to have your own URL and website you control completely. This can be more beneficial in many cases especially if you want to work on creating ad revenue through your blog. Doing so may be harder with platforms owned by other companies.
In that case, you should consider purchasing hosting space for a website and then installing open source blogging software onto it. The best and most famous choice is WordPress. There are other great competitors too like Ghost and Jekyll.
Focus on the Science
Lastly, but certainly not the least important, you need to make sure you focus on the science. It wouldn’t be much of a science blog otherwise. Make sure there is actually strong scientific integrity to the information you share in your articles.
You never want to post half-truths or pseudo-science and pass it off as scientific fact on your blog. This requires doing some research and studying up on different topics, but it will be worth the effort. You will be teaching your audience about the wonders of science and hopefully enjoying doing so at the same time.
Overall, learning how to start a science blog and starting one isn’t that difficult. The science, itself, is the more complex part. However, if you have a great love of science, that shouldn’t be too difficult either. Starting your own science blog can be very rewarding and help to expand both you and your audience’s understating of the world around them.