This is the fourth in a series of monthly reports detailing the revenue and expenses from building my blogging business.
In the first two months of the year (January 2017 and February 2017) I discussed my productivity strategy and how I got started building a newsletter with lead magnets. In these first two months of 2017, I had $26.97 of expenses and no revenue.
In this report, I will cover my expenses in March 2017, and some of the things I started doing to help build a community around my blog. Content is the first step in blogging, but building a community around you and your work is the second step. This includes the community of your actual audience and support communities outside of your blogging niche to help you keep going when times get tough (and they will, but that is why we are here!).
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March 2017 Summary
In addition to my smaller expenses through Boomerang and Mailchimp, I added my largest expense thus far in March. I signed up for a monthly membership to the Self Employed PhD (SEPhD) community, run by Jennifer Polk. I love this community and remained a member until they transitioned to the Beyond The Professoriate (BeyondProf)Â in November of 2018, which I am also a member of!
Looking back, making this purchase was a pretty pivotal mindshift early in my journey. I hemmed and hawed for quite a long time whether $15 USD (almost $20 CAD!!) per month was “worth it”.
These decisions often seem bigger than they actually are. In all honesty, I could afford the $20 to try it but I was stressing about the thought of paying that much each month as if I was going to be tied into it forever. As it turned out, I stayed in the group (but because I wanted to, not that I had to).
Since then, I have joined many communities, free and paid. My most expensive one at the time of writing, November 2018, is $97.50/month and price has no correlation to which ones are good. Some free ones I have loved and continue to participate in, while other paid ones have not been great. I am actually thinking of dropping the expensive one right now because I am only checking it once per month.
The important part, once you find these communities of like-minded people, is to join them and participate. The support you receive, contacts you will make, and accountability of your peers to stay on track when things get tough are necessary components to succeed over the long term!
Growing Your Community Through Expert Round-Up Posts
The other critical component of community is to build one for your audience. It doesn’t have to be a paid, formal thing, just create the feeling like they belong to something. I talked about creating a community in the newsletter for the February Income Report. A reader asked, “how do you actually do it?”
Listen to enough podcasts about blogging online and you will eventually hear about the famous “Round-Up Post”. You make a list of people that have experience in what you are blogging about, collect them together, ask them a question, and put their responses into a mega post!
That is exactly what I did in March on my blog. I released the world’s first round-up post on combustible dust safety: 30 Experts Share Largest Problems Facing the Combustible Dust Community.
Fifteen PhDs, more than a dozen industry experts, twelve countries, and over 550 years of combined experience in the field of combustible dust and industrial safety responded in what would end up being a 7500-word post!
I must admit that organizing such a large round-up is not for the faint-of-heart! For your first time, I would suggest going smaller and only doing 5 to 10 people. I emailed 60 and got 30 responses, which took me almost two full months to organize. However, from the people involved sharing and my own promotion, the effect on my blog was tremendous. In March, my visitor count went up by 168%, site views more than doubled, and my newsletter went from 40 to 80 subscribers. This set a new trajectory that brought my blog, and eventually business, to where it is today.
In a future post, I will outline exactly the steps I followed for my expert round-up but, for now, I just want to say that I would not have a business today if it wasn’t for this post.
It gave me the exact list of things I needed to tackle with my work and connected me with experts from around the world. More importantly, it made these experts feel like they were part of something and helped tighten the community around our mission.
