Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS
In this episode of the GradBlogger
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
Welcome to Episode 1 of the GradBlogger podcast, where we help academics build businesses and change the world through blogging, podcasting and video! I’m your host, Dr. Chris Cloney and I’m really excited to have you here.
This is the first episode of our podcast. It’s something I’ve been looking forward to doing for over two years now. And to start with, I wanted to have the opening episode not really be about me.
So we’ll talk about my origin story in more detail in a later episode. But for the time being, it’s kind of suffice to say that I am a recent PhD graduate. I graduated in April of 2018 and I took seven years to finish my PhD. Towards the end of that period I started writing and blogging about my research. I now own my own research company in that area called DustEx Research Ltd. that talks about increasing awareness and education in my research field and related industries.
Future Episodes
[00:00:57] So GradBlogger in general, and this podcast will be about helping you create a business by blogging, podcasting and creating video about your research and/or expertise. I really want this to be tactical in the sense that I want to give you “how” and “what” you need to do. I want to give you the tools to make this happen instead of just high-level theories and show you the actual steps you need to do to make this a reality and a possibility in your life.
So in this podcast, we’ll do different types of episodes. The first three are really focused on the three key elements I see to growing a research blog which are content, community and change. And in these you’ll hear only my voice. We’ll also do interviews and other types of episodes in the future along with more “How to” material.
And as I mentioned, we will go through my origin story in more detail as well. You’ll see some of this come up in these early podcast episodes, but as we move forward I want to show you the whole process that I went through to build my own business. If you want to hear more about my story, you can go to GradBlogger.com now. I have a lot of posts there and you can check out the about page for my story. My main business and website is DustSafetyScience.com from my research company today.
Why is the content step important?
[00:02:11] So why content? Why content creation strategies for starting your research blog as the first podcast episode? I am a firm believer that you really have three steps to growing a relevant website in your field, whether that be through writing a blog, whether it be through podcasting, or creating video, whatever the medium is.
“The three steps to building a successful blog are creating content, developing and fostering a community around that content, and then using that community to drive the change you want to see in the world.”
So I call these three steps: content, community and change. And that will actually be the topics of these first three podcast episodes. Once you get done this episode, I encourage you to go onto the next one, which will be about how to create a community around your blog and then the one after that which will be about the change you will actually create in the world. We will cover some kind of heavy topics there. Things like how do you deal with the fact that you may want to monetize your blog and build it into a business?. How does that result in you being an academic but maybe not going through the traditional path?
But I want to start with content. Because I think it’s the very first, most important step you need. So, that begs the question: Why is the content step the most important?
To build your own platform
[00:03:34] The most important reason to start with content is to begin building up your own platform – this is like your home base and normally this would be a website. You can blog on things like medium and even YouTube in different ways. But I would suggest that you start by creating your own website and content is a big part of that.
To have something to share
[00:03:53] The second most important part about content is that it gives you something to share. I call this building your content machine, which will initially be you at the start and probably you for quite a long time. Maybe at some point you can bring in some other people to help later with that. Or maybe you can start reusing content and other advanced strategies which we will outline at the end of this episode. But you need to get good at creating something to share in the world, regardless.
To practice your “ship” muscle
[00:04:11] The third most important reason to start with content and the biggest roadblock stopping people from creating their own business is not actually creating the content. It’s shipping the content.
I cannot count how many times I’ve sat down, talked with academics that actually have a blog and they’ve written whole bunch material. Maybe they have a course or something put together, but they’re delaying on actually pressing the big red upload button or the big blue upload button or whatever it is in WordPress.
This is the third part of why content is important: practicing this ship muscle. I recommend that people who are interested in learning more in this area check out the audio book, [Affiliate] Leap First by Seth Godin which taught me alot about why this is important.
Do I still get nervous?
[00:04:51] And yes, after three years in, I still get nervous when publishing content. I’m going to get very nervous when I release this podcast episode with the other two on community and change. But the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it.
“So there are the three reasons why content’s where you should start on your journey! You need to build up your own platform. You need to have something to share. And you need to practice your ship muscle.”
What are the four pillars of your content machine?
[00:05:52] So by this point, you’re probably saying, OK, Chris, I get it, we need content if we want to build a blog. We need to do this if we want to build a business and create create change from communicating our research or expertise online. On a very high-level I outline four key pillars that you need to be looking at for creating content: AKCC. A is for awareness, K for knowledge, C for connection. And then the last C is for Creating Change.
Pillar #1: Awareness
[00:06:24] When I started blogging about dust explosion research, which is a subset of industrial safety, which is a subset of chemical engineering, which was my PhD research field, I quickly realized the biggest question most people have: “What is a dust explosion?”.
Well, that’s a good question. Most people don’t know and a lot of industries don’t know, even though it’s a safety hazard in their field. I did all my research for my PhD in this area, and that’s really the first key element I highlight for content. You need to be able to create awareness about your topic. There are many fields in the world (think global warming research, vaccinations, ext.) where awareness is still a key driving element that is needed and you can provide.
Pillar #2: Knowledge
[00:07:06] Knowledge is the second pillar. How do you share knowledge with the public?, with other researchers?, with industries that are using this information? And that is going to be a key staple of your content for your blog. This includes answering the questions, Why? How? and What? are you blogging about.
Pillar #3: Connection
[00:07:15] The connection pillar is really about how do you get your readers to the next step. For example, someone comes to your blog, they become aware of the topic and begin to generate relevant knowledge. But now what do they do next? What is the next step for them?
In my case, with DustSafetyScience that is often to go to a consulting or equipment company to implement industrial safety solutions. That’s how I connect readers through to their next step. But for you, it may be connection to other members of the community, to an affiliate product, or recommending a book for somebody to read.
Pillar #4: Change
[00:07:39] The final pillar is creating content around the change you want to see in the world. It is hard to visualize this at first, but a year in, or two years in to creating your blog and community around your work, you will start to realize you have a pretty big voice. And you can actually influence the change that you want to see in the world.
That is really where I’m at today with DustSafetyScience and my company. We are looking at how can we influence change in these industries to avoid people being injured or killed when a fire or explosion occurs. And with that, I’m talking with industries that are in Africa, China, Germany and here at home in Canada, and North America as well. This level of change will also be available to you as you grow your business platform.
What are the types of blog posts?
[00:08:15] So by now you are probably asking: “But how do you actually go about the actionable side to creating content?”.
There is all kinds of different posts and a quick Google search of the “types of blog posts” will probably reveal lists that are 20 or 100 long. But I like to talk about four key posts that really got me started. I also talk about these in the GradBlogger Getting Started Mini-Course which is a 10 day email course on getting started with your blog. It goes through things like picking your blog name, buying your domain and hosting, how to setup the blog, how to make it look nice, ext.
Day five and a six of the mini-course are both on blog content strategies where this information comes from. So the four types of posts I recommend that worked really well for my platform and I think will help yours as well are:
- Review posts
- “How To” posts
- Current news posts
- Guest posts
Review posts are really a good tool if you do not know where to start. You could be reviewing individual papers, textbooks, scientific concepts, or you could reviewing things from your own life. The key here is that these are small and focused on one specific topic. You don’t need to do a ton of research for review posts. It’s really a case of “I read this paper. Here’s a review of it” or “I learned a scientific concept. Here’s my thoughts on that scientific concept”.
It may seem like you are not doing a lot by creating these posts, but if you create many of them, you can start to build a serious resource in your field. For example, you may have a section of your website that serves as the ultimate guide to a very large topic, but points to all of the individual posts on single sopics. Building these up over time can create massive authority for your blog and platform.
The second type of post I recommend is the “How To” post. This really describes how do you do different things that you’re doing every day. If you work in a research lab what are the processes you follow in your lab work? If you work as a historian doing research in libraries or through a textbook, you can actually blog on tools and tips people can use to do the same thing. These posts are usually a bit more work as you may need to pull in some research, or photos on the different steps.
The third type of post I recommend is Current News posts. This could be conferences or things going on around the world in your field. For example, in my case I do this a lot on fires and explosions where I pull in recent things that happened in my field that are relevant to my audience and put a science spin on them or figure out why it happened or what the cause was.
“A really good tool for “Current News” posts is Google Alerts. You can set it to email you each day or week with a list of news articles or posts about specific keywords which you can use to stay up-to-date with what is going on in your field.”
The final type of post I recommend are guest posts. We will go into my burnout story later in this episode and how often I think you should be blogging, but guest posts are what helped me get through that period. You can lean on other people’s information and other people’s knowledge to help create content.
How do I find blog topics?
[00:12:22] So the next question I get a lot is “how do I actually find topics to write about?” There’s a couple of key resources I like to look at for this.
Textbooks on Amazon
[00:12:28] One great way to find topics is to review textbooks on [Affiliate] Amazon.com. Go to Amazon and enter your topic in search and find the available textbooks. Amazon typically lets you open up the table of contents and a lot of the time this will be free or can be found in Google Books.
If you actually look at all of the topics in a 400 or 500 page textbook, that will give you like 5 years of content to write about that has been vetted as being important in your field. You are not going to go and strip that content from the textbook, but this will give you the topics you can research and write about.
Questions on Quora
[00:13:11] Another great place to research topics is Quora.com. There’s people asking questions on Quora every day and usually they are very detailed in what they are asking. This will give you topics you can write about and also give you the opportunity to share what you come up with more broadly.
AnswerThePublic.com
[00:13:20] Another place to find topics is AnswerThePublic.com. If you go to that website, be careful because the guy is kind of creepy, so sorry in advance! At this site you can type in a topic and they will give you a list of questions people are asking on google about that topic every day.
Questions on Social Media
[00:13:39] The last place I will recommend for getting topics is social media. This could be twitter or LinkedIn or wherever your audience hangs out. You can look up hashtags or ask your connections and find out what people are looking for in your field.
How to organize your blog topics?
[00:13:51] The best thing I like to do to organize my blog topics is to put them into a Google spreadsheet. I actually take all the topics and put them in one column. And if you’ve looked at the sources above you might have 50 or 100 topics. If you are writing one blog post per week, you only need 52 topics to cover the year, so you are going pretty far with this strategy.
At this stage, I like to do some keyword research. We won’t cover that in this podcast episode, but it is important to understand how search engine optimization will impact your blog. I then put the target keywords beside the topic in my spreadsheet. Lastly, I will take some time and think of some draft titles for the posts. This will give you a good baseline to create your blog posts from.
How often should I be creating content and posting?
[00:14:13] So I want to take a bit of a detour and talk about one of the most frequently asked questions I get, which is how often should I be writing blog posts or even better yet, how often should I be releasing blog posts?
The Short Story
[00:14:51] I am going to tell you the short story and the long story on this. The short story is, it doesn’t matter! You need to do what’s going to actually work for you and that you can get done when you first create your blog. It doesn’t really matter because at the start, nobody is actually going to come to your blog. When you put your blog online, when you press go, no one’s going to read it except for the people you tell that love you enough to actually go look at it. It’s very hard to get blogs started and that’s why a lot people slip off at the start. So it doesn’t really matter how often you should be blogging. If you don’t have a blog yet, get your blog up and then you can start having that conversation.
The Long Story
[00:14:23] So now the long story to this question. It actually matters a lot how often you are blogging. The reason I say this, is that if we go back to the reason why we start with content in the first place, the biggest thing you need to practice is that content creation and shipping muscle. So you need to be doing this routinely. And you need to have stuff to share to get people back to your blog.
What I recommend is you need to take a really long term view of this question of how often should you be blogging? And also keep in mind that it will fluctuate over time. Maybe you start with once a week or twice a month, and you’ll find that sometimes maybe you’ll be able do more.
The point is, you need to be consistently creating content over time. If you take a long view of this, you will work towards building a resourceful and authoritative platform about your topic – but it will take time.
So then I’d like to reframe the question to how often should I be blogging today? And that’s kind of a personal question. How often can you blog? How much can you fit into your schedule? And what’s going to work best for you? Don’t get too stressed about it.
“It’s better to be consistent and not blogging as frequently than to really try to go too far and burn yourself out.”
My early content creation story
[00:16:37] I want to share my story of content creation to illustrate some things I did right and what I did wrong. So I started my blog, which actually wasn’t DustSafetyScience.com in the beginning but was myDustExplosionResearch.com, in August of 2016. I launched my blog and had one post in August.
I had three posts in September and I had eight posts in October. And that was pretty hard. Those posts were all “How To” content. They required me getting a lot of images, doing a lot of research. I didn’t really know the strategy I am recommending to you today, with review posts and current news posts. I didn’t start using those, but I did start to do something that changed the game for me.
In November and December, I created 40 blog posts in 56 days using a templated post structure. These were actually review posts from journal papers I was reading as I was nearing writing time for my thesis. For each paper I read, I would make notes on the back. I’d summarize the three main points, my biggest takeaway, and how it fit in with the other literature.
Then every morning I would just take one of these papers from the stack and write a blog post about those notes. But beyond that, I also had a templated structure for the blog post. A prebuilt html post template in WordPress that I could just fill in the sections of the post I needed and add the image. I got the process down to creating a whole post from start to finishing in around one to one and a half hours.
These were not really long posts, usually 300-400 words but they were getting me creating content consistently. As I mentioned above, I was able to do 40 posts which was almost one every week day for two months. This really helped my website rank for keywords relevant to these papers. So when others in my field searched the title of one of these papers in google, my review was listed below the publishers site for the paper.
If you’re interested in this process, I actually wrote a blog post on it. I think it’s called How to Write 40 academic blog posts and 56 Days.
Content creation burnout
[00:18:23] So coming back to this question of how frequently should we be writing, this template structure worked really great. I was writing 5 posts a week, but there’s a downside to all of this content creation. When the New Year hit, I had my Christmas break and was really burnt out from writing. I didn’t actually release another blog post until March of the following year. So I went from writing every day to not writing for several months!
Moving forward
[00:20:45] But through this process, I did practice building my shipping muscle. When I got started back up it was with some really heavy hitting articles. In April 2017, I released the world’s only round-up post summarizing the opinions of over 30 experts in my field. This was a really important post for me which I discuss in the next podcast episode.
After that, I was writing between once and twice per month. But I also started bringing guest posts onto my website. This kept me going through the later half of 2017 and to start 2018 as I was writing my PhD dissertation.
Now today at DustSafetyScience we actually release a lot of blog posts. I write them myself, we do a podcast episode every week, and we also have the team that writes them. So we come up with probably 15 or so posts a week that are really part of our content generation machine now.
So this gives you an idea of the different frequencies that are possible over a three year period creating your blog. As I mentioned above, the number of posts per week varies significantly over time!
Four advanced tips to avoid burnout
[00:21:55] In the above story we talked about burnout from writing too many posts in too short of a time. I wanted to share some tips I learned to avoid having this happen to you.
Tip #1: Have a structured process where you are doing the same things at the same time each day. In my case, I was writing every morning for the first hour of my day. Now with my business, all of my written and video content generation is Monday and Tuesday with podcast recordings happening on Thursday. Wednesday and Fridays are for meetings or getting other work done.
Tip #2: Have a template structure, especially when you are just getting started. One of the hardest things on your brain is to work out the energy to figure out what to do next. If you have your list of topics, your templated structured process, and already know the next step, it is easy to move forward!
Tip #3: Do all of your planning in one month chunks. I recommend people do one topic for the entire month. Some people complain that their audience may want to read different topics, but it is important to remember that 95% of your readers over time will not be reading the posts in sequential order. So make it easy on yourself!
Tip #4: Reuse and stack content. One example of this is collecting 5 or 10 paper review posts and do a full literature review on the broader topic. You can then pull out, say the industry relevant conclusions and make a LinkedIn article about it. You could then create a slide deck to use in presentations. These high-value posts are made much easier once you have created the base content.
Conclusion
[00:24:19] So that’s everything I have today for this topic of content creation strategies for your research blog.
Again, these are really the “getting started” content strategies. We’ll do more on things like structured posts and we’ll talk about other more advanced content creation strategies moving forward. Be sure to click through to the next episode focusing on building a community around your blog. This isn’t like a paid membership, although it could be. This is actually bringing people in and building a tribe around what you’re doing!
Leave a Comment
What content creation strategies have you used that I missed in this episode? Put these in the comments below and help others build their blogs as well!
