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In this episode of GradBlogger, we interview Dr. Chris Humphrey from Jobs on Toast about the lessons he has learned over 10 years of blogging.
Disclosure: Some of the links in the podcast show notes and transcripts are affiliate links (indicated with [Affiliate] in front). If you choose to make a purchase through these links, GradBlogger will earn a commission from that purchase at no extra cost to you.
Introduction
Chris Cloney: 00:08
Welcome to Episode #31 of GradBlogger, where we’re helping academics change the world through online business. We’re helping you the listener by giving you the tools, tips, resources and strategies you need to create an online business around your expertise and focus so you can change the world. I’m your host, Dr. Chris Cloney. Today, we have Dr. Chris Humphrey from jobsontoast.com. Chris, welcome to the GradBlogger podcast!
Chris Humphrey: 00:36
Yeah, thanks so much, Chris, for inviting me on.
Chris Cloney: 00:38
Dr. Humphrey has a PhD and completed a post-doc in Medieval Studies from the United Kingdom. He moved from academia to business management consulting, and then subsequently moved into financial services, where he now works as a project manager. More importantly for GradBlogger.com is that he runs jobsontoast.com. This is a career confidence portal for PhDs, where you can figure out the next steps and gain the confidence and resources needed to identify and apply for jobs outside of academia.
Chris Cloney: 01:12
What’s interesting in our space is that he’s been running this for a long time. It’s almost a decade that Jobs on Toast has been running now- is that correct, Chris?
Can You Tell Us About Your Background Story?
Chris Humphrey: 01:20
That’s it. Just to give a bit of a back story on Jobs on Toast: I left academia in 2000. I’d been doing a PhD, as you said, but I wasn’t able to get a permanent academic job. I had interviews at five different UK universities. None of them were successful in landing me that elusive lectureship or professorship.
It’s one of the situations where I decided, “Okay, I need a plan B.” I decided to look for a job outside of academia rather than hanging around once my funding had run out.
Chris Humphrey: 01:58
Like you said, I wasn’t successful in getting a job inside of academia. Fast forward nine years to 2009 and my old dissertation supervisor got in contact with me and said, “Hey Chris, it would be great if you could come back to York and talk to PhDs in the Center for Medieval Studies.”
I went up there and gave a talk. It was great to see the impact that the talk had on the other PhDs there. It gave them confidence and a belief that they could do that too. That’s when I thought, “Okay, I’m onto something here. I want to get this material out to a wider audience.”
Chris Cloney: 02:44
That makes a lot of sense. It’s interesting to see the whole process. What’s the quote I heard the other day? Something like “Finding your path in life is a lot like parking up in the dark and running into something.” You get out of your car and you go looking. In your case, that something was your supervisor reaching back out and saying, “Hey, can you give this presentation?”
We’re interested in what you did: how you got out of academia and your whole journey there. Was it surprising to you that it happened?
Chris Humphrey: 03:16
It was surprising because -if I rewind a decade or further- there wasn’t anything in the public domain about this stuff. I mean, obviously, now we’re spoiled with choice with a number of different websites for PhDs seeking careers outside of academia. But back then it was very little and it wasn’t something I was aware of or interested in.
I’d left academia for nearly 10 years, so it was a bit of a bolt out of the blue. But I thought, “There’s value in this.” It’s that point when you connect with an audience and you feel you’re helping people who gave me that motivation to think, “I’ve done this once, but how many more PhDs are there in the UK or around the world who I could reach with the same material and the same message?”
Chris Cloney: 04:03
Okay, so around 2009 or 2010, your supervisor reached out to you to do this presentation and you realized that there are people out there who are struggling with this problem. What brought you to the online world to start Jobs On Toast? Today, it might be pretty common to start blogging about what happens in your life, but it probably wasn’t as common back then. How did that happen?
How Did You Get Started Online?
Chris Humphrey: 04:26
That’s the interesting part. I just thought, “How can I get this message out?” Maybe I could give talks at other universities. That would be one way to do it. But I was outside of the university sphere then. I wasn’t networked in with, for instance, university careers advisors and those kinds of people.
I saw that I could get the message out if I started blogging about my personal experience. I could write about some of the key things in my own journey, but I could also have a bit of a virtual brochure that would advertise a service that I can provide, which was giving these talks in universities.
Chris Humphrey: 05:10
That’s the germ of the idea. It took me until June 2012 to figure this whole thing out and know the answer to questions like:
- How do you start blogging?
- How do you set up a blog?
- How do you write content?
I used to (and still do) write content when I was on the bus or on the train to work, but it’s like learning a whole different language and style of doing things to be able to produce 300 or 600 words of good content. There was also the graphics and everything, so it did take me a while to learn all that stuff.
Chris Cloney: 05:44
It takes even longer if you want people to be able to read it.
The reason we have Dr. Humphrey on today is to try to steal his strategy. He got started back 2009-2010. He’s been in this blogging world for about a decade. I want to explore what he learned, what’s worked to grow authority in his space, what hasn’t worked, and use those 10 years of experience to benefit our listeners.
Before we jump into that, I want to thank Dr. Humphrey. He is the winner of the [Affiliate] Superfans book draw that we held. We did this back in Episode #19: The power of superfans to grow your blog and business with Pat Flynn.
Chris Cloney: 06:30
The challenge was to tag myself and Pat Flynn on social media with the change that you want to put in the world. Chris said, “I started my website Jobs on Toast to drive change, so that one day, every university has a career program for its researchers supporting all career paths. That’s what I do. And I recently just passed 10 years of doing it.”
We did the random draw a number of weeks ago now. I think the book that we’re sending is in the air on its way over the water to Dr. Humphrey now. I want to say thank you: for entering the draw and for the work that you’ve been doing.
I’m excited to jump on this topic now. What have you learned over the last 10 years of blogging? Maybe before we jump right into the tips and strategies and techniques and that stuff that the audience loves, can you tell us the purpose of Jobs on Toast today? Why does it exist?
What Is The Purpose Of JobsOnToast? Why Does It Exist?
Chris Humphrey: 07:28
When I started off, I saw an opportunity to get innovation out there. But as I’ve been going over the last decade, I’ve refined it to three main reasons.
The first reason why I started it is to share this framework for researchers to make the transition out of academia. It can seem very daunting when you’re moving from academia into another career. You’re not sure where to even start. There’s also the enormity of the change. But, based on my own experience, I put together this five-step process and I think if you follow these five steps, it’s going to guide you in getting a successful career outside of academia. That was the first reason that I started.
Chris Humphrey: 08:14
On top of that, there are two more aims that I developed as I went along. The second is to campaign for universities to provide structured career support for researchers on all career paths. The universities and supervisors can be quite good about giving feedback at an academic job. But what about people who want to do research and get a job outside of academics?
I believe that university career services, as they deal with undergraduates, should be supporting the postgraduate community as well. I’ve tried to campaign for that and where there are examples of universities doing a good job, I’ve tried to share those through my blog and through social media. Obviously, I contribute that myself if I get invited to go and give a talk.
Chris Humphrey: 08:56
The third reason is to help employers understand the value of people with higher degrees and what they can bring to their organizations. It can be easy to think of a PhD as somebody in an ivory tower, in a lab. What skills have they got that are relevant to the real world?
We know those stereotypes, but in fact, researchers are intelligent, highly-motivated people with strong personal values. They want to make a difference in the world, and they’re fantastic employees once they’ve made that adjustment to working in a different type of profession. That’s something that has come more recently: trying how to change employers’ perceptions of the value of researchers and to open those doors.
Chris Cloney: 09:38
Yeah, I liked that process. I talk to a lot of academics who are out there building businesses, and certainly my businesses went along the same lines. I started with the awareness and education around industrial safety and fire and explosion hazards. But I’ve found that as we’ve grown over the last three going on four years now, that there’s an advocate role for me at the government level, for regulations and engineering guidance.
At the pointy end of the stick, you had the strategies and techniques: the things that you needed to help people move forward. Then you started campaigning for universities. In my case, I’m advocating on a government level and regional level for safer industrial safety practices. You’re advocating more on a university level for getting this type of training put in place for employees. I liked that.
You mentioned that on the strategy side, you had this five-step framework. Do you mind highlighting what those steps are?
Chris Humphrey: 10:41
No, that’s no problem. I can run through that.
One of the first things that I try and encourage researchers to do is think about their transferable skills. It can be a challenge when you’ve been in university for a long time. You’re used to qualifications for your degrees, but you don’t always think about all the transferable skills that you’ve acquired in all those years of education.
You’ve done things like public speaking, and you’ve probably got very good IT skills or foreign language ability. There are also things like scientific methods. All those transferable skills give you real confidence when it comes to applying for jobs outside of academia because employers want people who can do certain things. That’s always the first step I encourage people to do: reflect and identify their transferable skills.
Chris Humphrey: 11:42
The second thing that I always encourage people to focus on is their profession. Target your profession because it can be easy to get bewildered by the sheer number of job opportunities outside of academia. With IT, health, financial services, consulting, government, and more, where do you even start?
I encourage people to narrow it down and focus on a particular profession. In my case, I focused on e-learning and web-based training because I felt that was something I had an education background in, but I was also interested in how you apply education and knowledge transfer techniques within E-learning. That was my first job outside of academia: as an E-learning consultant.
Chris Humphrey: 12:28
I think it’s important to focus your job search on a specific industry or sector. Then I think it’s important to get the right experience. I’m speaking as a project manager but also a manager of other project managers. I am a project team manager. I have to hire people. I’m always looking for people with experience. Why not? Because that shows that they can do it. And it lessens the risk when you’re hiring a new person.
I would encourage people to get experience either by doing an internship, or maybe doing some sort of freelance work, or maybe taking on a part-time job in a sector or an area where they think they would like to work. Then you’ve got that experience on your resume when you come to apply for a job outside of academia.
The fourth step is what I call ‘professional brand’. Don’t present yourself as a PhD, or as a PhD student, but as a professional. Use the same language that your potential employer is going to use. As a researcher, you’re managing a project, which is your dissertation. You can call yourself a project manager or a research project manager. So, find a way to brand yourself that will resonate with the employer. Don’t use the language of academia: it may not be something that employers understand.
Chris Humphrey: 14:00
And finally, the last step is having a competent story to tell about your transition outside of academia. It can be difficult for some people, especially for someone like me. I could look back and say, “Well, I was unsuccessful in getting an academic job. I’ve had five interviews but I was declined each time.” It can sound like a failure, but you’ve got to turn it around and say, “What’s the positive?”
When I was making my transition, I emphasized that I’d acquired funding and delivered a big research project that was important to me. I’d also published a book off the back of it. Now I’m looking for a new challenge and taking my education and learning outside of academia into the business world. I presented a positive story about why I was making my transition.
Chris Cloney: 14:50
Thanks for sharing, because I think that’ll be of interest to our audience. Certainly, some of them are building out their own business. Some of them are working and creating these side hustles for their business.
I noted the five steps, and it mirrors entrepreneurship in a way. First, identify what your skills are. Anyone who’s listening to the podcast knows that niching down is an important aspect of finding an audience. To develop experience, get out there and get your hands dirty. Then you need to focus on personal branding and knowing your backstory. It’s a direct parallel to things you need to be thinking about in the entrepreneurship space.
Chris Humphrey: 15:41
Yeah, that’s interesting. I’d never thought about it as a parallel like that, but I guess you are an entrepreneur and you are going out there and selling yourself.
Chris Cloney: 15:50
Well, that’s the thing. We’re all selling something at all times. It’s a question of what it is, so I liked that.
So you’re running Jobs on Toast now. We have an idea of what it’s about. What benefits have come to you from creating this online platform and growing it over the last number of years?
What Benefits Have Come From Creating An Online Platform?
Chris Humphrey: 16:13
I guess the main benefit was feeling like I was making a difference and an impact in the world. For me, there is some monetary part of it because I get paid for giving talks at universities and I get a little bit of affiliate income. I guess it’s the opportunity to make a difference in the world and make an impact and help Ph.Ds.
I know the challenges that are out there, and if I can help other people with that, it will be a really fantastic thing to do. It was something to do in my spare time, so there’s that aspect of it and there is also a creative aspect to it.
Chris Humphrey: 16:54
In my job as a project manager, it can be quite technical and programmatic, with a series of stages when you’re delivering a change within an organization or for a customer. I like the creativity of blogging and writing and connecting with people and sharing ideas. So I think it’s personally fulfilling for me in a creative way as well as the actual impact in the world.
Finally, it’s keeping up with technology. I’ve always loved technology and been interested in the latest thing and it’s fascinating to use online platforms and all the different things that go with them, like social media and all these tech tools and techniques like SEO. I am an actual student in some ways and so I love exploring those things and keeping up with them all.
Chris Cloney: 17:51
Yeah, those are great reasons. I hope we’re selling a bit to the audience on why you should get started. The one I want to highlight and want to put a star around is the impact.
Whether or not you’re running this as a side hustle or you create your own business and you’re running your own company like I’m doing with GradBlogger and DustSafetyScience, I am a firm believer that the impact you can have if you’re willing to get out of your comfort zone and get your voice out there online is tremendous. I don’t know how else to say it.
Through DustSafetyScience, I’m participating in research programs everywhere from the Middle East to Sweden to Brazil and the United States. We’re running our own mini-university program, our own mini-platform around research into this topic of dust explosions.
Chris Cloney: 18:42
Now it’s all funded by having traffic and authority and building a profitable business from it, but basically, I’ve created this condition with DustSafetyScience where I’m self-tenured. We have a budget for travelling, a budget for research. We’re working on hopefully bringing in a Masters student or Ph.D. student and supporting them through university.
This all happened because I started writing a blog online three or four years ago. And it’s interesting to see that impact is one of the first things that you highlighted in the benefits that you saw. Do you mind sharing where Jobs on Toast is today? Maybe in terms of traffic, size or scope?
Chris Humphrey: 19:26
Yeah, sure. It’s beyond what I ever thought I could achieve. It’s funny: when I started, I used to check my stats, and some days I’d get zero views and think, “Is it worth carrying on?” I’m pretty sure we’ve all been there when we started, but we’re persistent people as PhDs- we don’t give up easily.
I’m quite proud that for the last four or five years, my traffic’s been at about 40,000 unique visitors a year. If all those people are getting a tip or a technique or a link or tool -some takeaway that helps make that transition out of academia easier, then I’m pretty pleased about that.
Chris Cloney: 20:14
That’s around 3,000 a month and between 100 and 150 a day, which is pretty amazing, really. I remember the same struggle. You go a week with around three people and then you build it up from there, right?
Chris Humphrey: 20:31
Yeah, that’s exactly how it started off. Like I said, it’s levelled out and I’m sure if I did more I could expand the reach. But I’m running this pretty much as part of my commute. I’ve got a family and a day job so these things take precedence, but this is my hobby and passion project so it’s not too bad in a few hours a week to achieve that.
I admire what you’re doing, Chris, and you’re saving lives with what you’re doing as well. That’s fantastic and it just shows what you can do. This is what staggers me in a way: how much impact one person can have using these online tools. I didn’t have much of a clue when I started off, but being self-taught is amazing. So is what you can achieve and what difference you can make in the world.
What Things Worked To Grow Your Blog?
Chris Cloney: 21:35
Let’s dive into growing. We talked about the early days and seeing those numbers and checking your stats. Eventually, you hopefully get to a point where you don’t check your stats obsessively anymore, but that takes longer for some personality types than others, probably. What are some things that have worked to grow your blog or to grow the authority in your space?
Chris Humphrey: 21:59
One of the things I did early on is to discover Pat Flynn’s blog and podcast. I wasn’t trying to create an online business, but I could understand what Pat was talking about. It was about growing an audience and getting loyalty and fans and people who would share your content.
I listened to that and did some of the things that Pat said. For instance: thinking about what keywords people would be searching for. So, if people are looking for a job outside of academia, they would be looking for ‘jobs after my Ph.D.’ I focused in on some keywords in my earlier blog posts, like ‘life after the Ph.D.’ I put something in a title and then a couple of times in the body of the text to try and make sure that it would be found in the search engines.
Chris Humphrey: 22:55
When you Google those sorts of terms, like ‘after the PhD,’ I was coming up in the top five or top 10 so that helped to get me on people’s radars. When people found my articles, they linked to them from university careers websites and of course from .edu domains, which I think gives you an extra boost. That’s another thing that helped pull me up: the good quality content that I was putting out got linked to by university career sites.
Chris Cloney: 23:35
Any other tips there? Getting links from big websites is an important thing. Maybe I’ll share a couple of tips that you could use, but does anything else jump out in terms of things that worked for you?
Chris Humphrey: 24:02
Yeah. After I got the blog up and running, I turned to social media and built my social media presence. I’m very active on Twitter. I’ve got a Facebook page and LinkedIn, and more recently Instagram, with my kids helping me with Instagram.
I’m publishing a mix of content. I publish some links to my own articles, but also other good articles that I found. It helps to establish you as an authority in that you can not only share your own content but good content from other people. That’s what I do as well. I make sure I get those posts going and it builds up. I’ve got more than 4,000 Twitter followers and nearly 3,000 on LinkedIn. I can get a good reach through social media as well.
Chris Cloney: 25:02
One thing that I did during my early days with backlinks is search something like ‘PhD jobs.’ There’s a way to search what’s in a URL for a website. I think it’s URL, colon, and then the terms, so if you search jobs plus URL resources, then you’ll get all the websites that have PhD jobs on them. You get all these job boards or you’ll get a lot of those university websites that show up.
There’s a great trick I learned from Brian Dean of Backlinko. There’s a tool called Check My Links, which is a Google Chrome add-on. Anytime I visit a website, I click this tool and it shows any broken links as red and all the good links as green.
Chris Cloney: 25:56
The strategy is to check the resource page and check their links. More often than not, if they have 20 links, at least one of the pages is dead. It’s red. You email them to say, “Hey, I was looking at your website the other day, and I love what you’re doing. I went to the resource page and found a lot of great information. I noticed that this link was broken, so I just thought you can fix it or, if you want, you can link to an article that I created on the specific topic.”
I did that for maybe 30 or 40 websites during the early days, and I think 35 of them came back and added my website. So that’s a good way to get onto people’s resources pages and get more backlinks.
Chris Humphrey: 26:44
I think a lot of my stuff has come more organically, but that’s a good idea if you’ve got the time to put some dedicated effort into it because once you’ve got a link on a good site, it’s going to be sending you traffic every day for years.
Chris Cloney: 27:02
Yeah, I agree. When I went to your website, I was pretty impressed by the flow. It has good elements. You have the direct reading list on the sidebar. When we click on number one, it’s your PhD and diagram. It’s an infographic. It’s totally easy, digestible.
Imagine I come to your website as a new reader. It’s like, “Here’s what I should read first.” I click on it and get an easy win. It’s a nice instant win, which Pat Flynn talks about in his Superfans book. Then it’s got links through to all the other stuff you’ve created but in a very logical fashion. My point is that it’s very well laid out.
You mentioned Pat Flynn. What other influences have you had? Because I imagine there’s a listener out there, thinking, “Let’s create a website, but I don’t even know the first thing to do.”
Chris Humphrey: 28:08
Thanks, Chris, for the feedback. I do try and put myself in the shoes of somebody who’s starting off and that’s how I was trying to approach it. I like to look around the web myself and see what works, like a big friendly image. I think that’s another thing from Pat that works well. It makes a human connection with the person.
Chris Humphrey: 28:50
About the reading list: I thought, “What do PhDs like?” They like a reading list, right? You start off with questions like, “What are the 10 things you should read?” I try to think back to my own experience and organize the content in a way that’s familiar and accessible to the reader. I’ve always tried to empathize with what a researcher starting out is going to want and try to arrange the content in a way that is easily consumable for them.
Chris Cloney: 29:25
You mentioned going around the web and seeing what you like and bringing that all together. That’s synthesization. I don’t think that’s a word, but synthesizing information, that’s what we do, that’s what we’re good at. That’s the way to bring that information together and pull the best from each of those websites that you’re visiting.
Is there anything that you’ve tried that hasn’t worked or anything that you’ve taken a swing at that you stopped doing?
What Have You Tried That Didn’t Work? Or Maybe Want To Try But Didn’t Get Started?
Chris Humphrey: 30:11
Yeah, I had some ideas early on. As you know, some PhDs looking for support to make that transition will hire a coach, like a career coach. I saw there were some career coaches around and I thought it would be great to have a directory of career coaches. If people want to hire somebody, they could look in that directory and find someone and I could get a referral fee because they referred someone who came in through Jobs on Toast.
Chris Humphrey: 30:53
It didn’t take off, though. There weren’t enough coaches to make a directory. People I approached weren’t getting paid a lot for coaching anyway, and they were reluctant to pay me a fee. They were hardly making enough money themselves. Also, PhDs haven’t necessarily got the money for high-end coaching. It was something that I thought was a good idea, but it didn’t take off.
Chris Cloney: 31:28
That’s kinda funny because I also had a grand vision of a job board on DustSafetyScience and that didn’t work out either. if you’re listening to this and you’ve run a blog that has a job board that works, reach out to me. We’d love to have you on the podcast because that didn’t work for me.
We do have an industry directory. If you have a company and you’re looking for a specific piece of equipment, a consultant, or a hazard analysis or assessment or identification, we have the central area where people can see what their different options are around the globe.
Chris Cloney: 32:11
You need to be getting good and steady traffic to be able to do that. What those numbers are dependent on what industry you’re in. Our traffic right now is about 4,000 or 4,500 a month, which is enough to run something like that in our industry.
If you’re doing something more general- say you had a job board for designers- you probably need 10 times or maybe 100 times more than that to make it effective and compete with Upwork. But it’s interesting because I tried a job board in the early days as well and there just weren’t enough people interested in it. it’s interesting to hear that that didn’t work for you as well.
Chris Humphrey: 32:46
Yeah, it is interesting. I always say that I can’t know what my readers and audience want exactly. I can think about what they might want but how do I know for sure? If people like it, they click on it, they email you about it or make a social media post about it. Then you can tell, so you run with that and you expand that approach. That’s another way to think about what works and what doesn’t work.
Chris Cloney: 33:39
I couldn’t agree more. It’s always a learning process and what you know in a year is different than what you’re going to know in three years and what you’re going to know in 10 years. What do you think is next? What’s down the tracks for Dr. Chris Humphrey and for Jobs on Toast?
What Is Next For You and JobsOnToast.com?
Chris Humphrey: 33:56
I’m keen to keep Jobs on Toast running. I want to draw together all the advice and the guidance I’ve published on the site over the years and put it into an ebook and get that up on the site. That’s something people can buy and take away.
That’s part of the plan for Jobs on Toast. But I’m also working on some other side projects. Having worked for more than 10 years now in this whole area of careers and career change, I’m feeling that for people in their twenties, career progression is an important thing for them. They want to move along in their career. They want to get a promotion or they want to climb up the ladder.
That’s something I want to support with a website. I want to curate all the best material around career progression. It could be books, it could be training videos. That’s the next thing on my list.
Chris Cloney: 35:10
I think it’s a great idea. You have graduate students, you have people who have graduated and are looking for employment and people who have employment and want to know the next steps. And then you probably have people who are 20, 30 years in and want to figure out what the next step in their life is.
You spent a lot of time on this first segment of helping people who are still in grad school or recently graduated get into an employment position. But there’s a whole other market. I know because I was in it for five years. It consists of people who are employed and want to know how to progress. You used the word career progression. I think it’s important to target that group because they need help as well, I’m sure.
Chris Humphrey: 35:55
I’m glad to hear that, Chris. The other thing that I would say is that – this comes back to what we were talking about impact and our personal values- the experience of many people in their forties and fifties is that they have to climb the greasy pole. They have climbed the ladder, the corporate ladder, but they are just chasing more profit or a bigger car or a bigger office, and it is ultimately unsatisfying to them.
Chris Humphrey: 36:36
One thing I noticed is that people in their forties and fifties are dropping out of that and going into things like starting their own business or going to work for a charity. There’s a cycle where people are looking for some other kinds of progression. It’s not necessarily the next run of the ladder, but it’s a spiritual progression or a fulfillment. That’s something that I’d like to capture with what I’m doing. It’s not just all about the materiality of progression.
Chris Cloney: 37:10
Yeah, I would agree. We get to a point. I was there because I was working 60-70 hours a week and trying to do a PhD on top of everything. I asked myself if what I’m doing here was worth it and thought about the impact that it had on me physically and mentally. If you didn’t grind that hard for a short duration like I did, but maybe only worked 50 hours a week, you might be able to do that for 15 years and then turn around and go, “What happened there? It’s time to work on myself a little bit.”
Chris Humphrey: 37:40
Yeah, exactly. You missed your kids growing up.
Chris Cloney: 37:44
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, and I appreciate you taking the time to come on and share some lessons learned over the last decade running Jobs on Toast. As I said, the Superfans book is in the mail. I believe it’s on a plane. It was going to cost 46 extra dollars to track it. I didn’t pay for tracking, so I can’t tell you specifically where it is over the Atlantic, but it is coming to you and it’s on the way.
Chris Humphrey: 38:11
Yeah. All right, I look forward to getting that. Like I said, I’ve been a big fan of Pat Flynn for a long time, even though he specializes in online business. I think all his techniques for how to build a website, build a presence, build a brand and be authentic apply to all types of businesses. Yeah, I’m looking forward to reading that book when it lands. I’m sure it will in the next few days.
Chris Cloney: 38:36
Excellent. Thank you for sharing your expertise on the podcast today and I look forward to the chance to talk again soon.
Chris Humphrey: 38:42
Thanks very much Chris. All the best.
Chris Cloney: 38:44
You’ve been listening to myself, Dr. Chris Cloney, and Dr. Chris Humphrey from Jobs on Toast. We were talking about lessons he’s learned over the last 10 years of blogging. We went through his background and how he got started online. It was through a presentation that he was asked to give at his university about his experience moving from academia to an alternative career choice. That gave him a little hint that this is something people want to know about. So he started Jobs on Toast, and it’s introduced some new things into his life.
Chris Cloney: 39:24
In the podcast episode, we talked about what things are working, what things he tried that didn’t work, and just a good overview of what it’s like to run a website that’s focused on graduate students. If you liked this episode, tag me @GradBlogger on Twitter or Instagram. You can also tag Chris Humphrey @jobsandtoast on Twitter and Instagram and you can find him at Dr. Chris Humphrey on LinkedIn. You can also obviously find him at jobsontoast.com.
Chris Cloney: 40:03
In this episode specifically, we’ll pull out a chit chat where we talk about some of these tips that Chris and I had for building your website and blog. You can also find the transcripts for this episode at gradblogger.com/31.
I appreciate the work that you’re doing. I hope you have a great week ahead and continue to build your online business as an academic, as a researcher, as a person with a PhD, and increase the change that you put into the world.
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Flynn, Pat. Superfans: The Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe, and Build a Successful Business
Previous Podcasts
GBP019- The power of superfans to grow your blog and business with Pat Flynn
