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In today’s episode of the GradBlogger Podcast, we are revisiting the first training session inside the Self-Tenure Community. The name of this particular session was ‘Planning Your Road on the Self-Tenure Track.’ I walked through a lot of the fundamentals of building an online business as an academic in this space. I also gave some tools that can be used to accomplish business goals.
What is the Self-Tenure Community?
The Self-Tenure Community is an entrepreneurship community for academics who are or want to become online business owners. It includes:
- Community forums
- Curated mastermind groups
- Monthly trainings,
- One-on-one private coaching between myself and community members
We shut down for about three months after launching and are just getting ready to start our second mastermind session. You can access the current status of the Self-Tenure Community at selftenure.com.
Connecting Your Path With Your Dream
There’s a quote that I like from M. J. DeMarco in his book, ‘The Millionaire Fastlane.’ He talks about getting your road to converge with a fantastic dream and says that a road that doesn’t converge with your fantastic dream is a dead end. Are you heading towards some dream that you have for your life? if not, then you might need to rethink that.
That’s really the guiding principle behind the Self-Tenure Community: to help you build a business and give you the option to pursue your dreams, whatever they are.
If your dreams are to stay in academia and run a side business, that is fantastic. If your dream is to do your own thing, work from home and just have more time with your family, that’s fantastic as well. The Self-Tenure Community gives you the tools you need to build this business that can support your life.
Be Prepared For Challenges
Building an online business is hard. There will be challenges along the way. That’s why we have this community: so we can lean on others in the masterminds and the community forum. This training will also give you the roadmap so you can make the right decisions for your goals.
However, there’s a bigger reason why this community and session are important. It’s that we need you. The world needs you. When you do your work, it makes an impact and can actually change the world.
GradBlogger Business M.A.P.
The GradBlogger Business M.A.P. is an idea that I’ve worked through with some of my coaching clients The M.A.P. part stands for Mission, Authority, Profit. These are the three components to building a successful online business. Let’s take a closer look at the first two below. We’ll cover the third element – Profit- in the next episode.
Big and Little Missions
You need both big and little missions. With my business at Dust Safety Science, our big ambition is to have one year with zero fatalities worldwide by 2038. For GradBlogger, our mission is to help a thousand academics change the lives of a thousand people each. That’s how I’m going to make an impact on a million people in the world.
I can’t tell you what your big M mission is going to be. You may know it already or you may need to discover it throughout this process. That’s totally fine. Because if you don’t have a big M mission, you can still get by.
It’s important to also set these small M mission goals. Examples include getting a hundred visitors to your site, making $500 a month, or paying off student loan debt. These are all goals you can strive towards as you’re building an online business. It’s important to identify them as you go, so you have something that keeps you driving when times get difficult, because they will get difficult, like I mentioned before.
Authority-Based Marketing
I was reading a book called ‘ProBlogger: The Secrets to Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income’ by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett. Darren Rowse owns problogger.com, which is a big blogging website. For me, the interesting part of the story was Chris Garrett. He owned a website called authorityblogger.com. It’s now ChrisG.com. Hee had this really interesting line: “Darren makes money from blogging. I don’t do that. I make money because of blogging, rather than directly from it. I make money based on the authority that my blogging gives me.”
I thought, “That’s what I do.” By blogging as an academic, I’m building up authority and I’m going to make money because of my blogging, not directly from it. Authority marketing is what we’re doing as academics.
When I left my job in July of 2016 in order to finish my PhD, I started a blog on dust explosions called mydustexplosionresearch.com. Later, I started a newsletter and made my first money online by selling logo space in a sponsor area for $200 per month per company. Soon people were buying a year in advance!
From there, I continued to grow the newsletter. I started to put a lead magnet called the Combustible Dust Incident Report on my website. I emailed 15 companies and said, “We’ll put your logo on the report on the community page.” All 15 companies said, “Yes, of course we would do that. That’d be fantastic.” So if you do the math, that’s $2750, so I think it comes out to $350 a month or so, because we do every six months. I was able then to boost my monthly recurring revenue from $200 up to $500 a month.
So, I spent a lot of time thinking, “How can I grow this business? What can I do?” I really doubled down on the advertising and the messaging. I knew I’d need a new brand and a new website, so I created dustsafetyscience.com.
In April of 2018, I defended my thesis. It was on a Tuesday. The next day, my company, DustEx Research Limited, was incorporated. That Friday, I flew to Chicago to the world’s biggest trade show in my industry and signed up 10 companies in three days. That was enough for me to get up to $3,000 a month, which I had set as my monthly recurring revenue goal. I’m happy to say that I’ve continued to increase my revenue and grow the business.
This gives you an idea of the things that are possible by content creation, becoming an authority and putting a big mission out into the world. Today, our business consists of different divisions. The education component is the Dust Safety Academy, which runs an annual conference online. We have Dust Safety Professionals, where you connect the community with people to help them with equipment and consulting. Next year, we’re launching the Dust Safety Foundation, which is an institute to fund research projects and support communities and families that are suffering loss from these types of explosions. This was all possible from a silly blog that I called mydustexplosionresearch.com.
You’ve got to get good at creating content. You’ve got to get good at putting it into the world. You’ve got to fight that fear that comes up every time you press publish. When you do so, you’ll be headed toward the next stage of the GradBlogger Business M.A.P., which is ‘Profit.’
If you have questions or feedback about this episode, please leave a comment below. If there are different authority-building steps that you’ve taken, we’d also like to know what they were and how they worked for you. Please share!
