Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS
In this episode of GradBlogger, we talk about using three-minute papers to drive traffic to your website. We discuss what makes them so valuable from both an informational and SEO perspective. We also discuss how to create these types of posts and ‘grade’ them for effectiveness. This episode is the second in the Content Machine series.
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.
Previous Content Machine Episodes
Using Random Topic Blogging as Your First Content Machine | GBP008
Introduction
Chris Cloney: 00:08
Welcome to Episode #11 of GradBlogger, where we’re helping academics build online businesses through blogging, podcasting, and video. Our goal is to change the world with our research companies, side hustles, and businesses by sharing our knowledge and expertise online. I’m your host, Dr. Chris Cloney. In today’s episode, we’re talking about using three-minute papers to drive traffic to your website.
Chris Cloney: 00:33
This is the second episode in the Content Machine series. For those of you who are just tuning in, this is a series where we’re looking at different ways to create repeatable, scalable content for your website, your blog and your business.
The first episode of the Content Machine series was on random topic blogging, or RTB, and that was on Episode #8. In this current podcast episode, we’ll talk about three-minute papers, namely:
- What they are
- Why they are so valuable
- How they integrate cross-linking and search engine optimization
We’ll take a step-by-step approach on how to create these types of posts, including:
- Creating the templates
- Writing them
- Posting them online
Then we’ll go through a post and give it a report card like we did during the random topic blogging, or RTB episode, where we discussed content creation and content distribution. to get started, let’s answer two questions: why three-minute papers and why content machines?
Why Three Minute Papers?
Chris Cloney: 01:47
This is one of the biggest hurdles that I’ve seen people encounter when trying to start online. A lot of the questions that we get involve how to:
- Find unique content ideas
- Find time to write and create content
- Do both consistently
Maybe you do it for a week or two or a month or two, but then you get burnt out and stop posting on your website, which in turn stops driving traffic. This is a problem because that’s we’re trying to do at the end of the day: become experts in our field and authority online by driving traffic back to our websites and using that to build businesses, change the world, and change our world as well. The purpose of the content machines is to build repeatable, scalable processes to create unique content.
Chris Cloney: 02:29
I want everyone listening to this podcast to be able to become the world’s biggest authority in their field. That’s very, very manageable for many people. If you’re doing a Master’s or a Ph.D. in social media, there may be a lot of people already writing about this topic online, but other topics, like dust explosions, are scarcely covered. There’s a big gap that you can fill with your research.
What are Three-Minute Papers?
Chris Cloney: 03:14
To illustrate what a three-minute paper is, I want to tell a bit of a story that provides background on where this whole concept came from.
I started blogging in late 2016 at mydustexplosionresearch.com. My first three posts took weeks to write and create images for. I was taking screenshots of a lot of things I was doing. I was also taking my own photos to help create quality posts and they were good, but they left me burnt out.
Chris Cloney: 03:48
I was thinking there has to be a better way. I was looking at a lot of online marketing materials, and reading information posted by people who were big in this space. Finally, I came across an individual named Niklas Goeke who had a post called How to Publish Like a Huge Content Creation Machine Even When It’s Just You.
Chris Cloney: 04:06
I started reading quite a bit about Niklas. He had a website called fourminutebooks.com, where every day he did a blog post that summarized a book. In the post How to Publish Like a Huge Content Creation Machine Even When It’s Just You, he offers a step by step explanation on how he:
- Writes these posts
- Creates the template for them
Niklas drove 30,000 visitors to his website in 60 days with these posts. He also gained 837 e-mail subscribers and made $376 in affiliate commissions. Afterward, he went on to partner with Blinkist, which does three-to-five-minute audio summaries of books, and made considerably more than $376.
When I read this post, I realized that I could do something quite similar with my academic research. I called it three-minute papers. This was before I’d ever heard of things like a three-minute thesis.
This is what we’re going to talk about in this episode:
- How to do a three-minute paper post, or TMPP
- How to do these summaries
- What template to create and use
- How they’re optimized for cross-linking, stacking content, and search engines.
How To Create Three-Minute Papers?
Chris Cloney: 05:46
There are five steps you need to take to create three-minute paper posts. I’ll explain it using my own template.
Step 1 – Create a template to use over-and-over again
Step number one is to create a template and use it over and over again. One of the biggest struggles people have in getting started with their content creation is figuring out what to do next. This is one of the biggest barriers with RTB, random topic blogging, and it can be overcome by these three-minute papers.
The first is the introduction to the post. In my template, I had the same introduction to every post. I put a one-sentence summary. For example, a predictive single-step model for coal paralysis is developed and validated. That could be a one-sentence summary. I also listed the author and the fact that I had read the post in three minutes. This is something I picked up from Niklas Goeke, who stated that on each of his posts that he had read it in four minutes.
Chris Cloney: 07:14
The second part was an image. Each post should have at least one image, which also helps with SEO. In my example, I pulled a quote from the article I was reading and created a quote card for it. If you Google “free quote image generator”, “free quote maker” or something similar, I’m sure you’ll find something that will work.
The key was that it worked quickly. I didn’t waste a bunch of time creating all these images and I could get something that boosted the SEO quality of my post. It also added some interest for the reader because they got to see an actual quote from the paper.
Chris Cloney: 07:58
The third step, or the third part of my template, was four paragraphs, which I usually limited to two or three sentences each.
- The first paragraph was the paper’s goals.
- The second paragraph was the paper’s methods.
- The third paragraph was high-level findings
- The fourth paragraph was always the same. It was just three of the main findings from this paper.
Those were the first three sections of my template. The fourth section consisted of four headings:
- Finding #1: I described the finding in detail and that would be the title of that heading.
- Finding #2: Something like ‘single step model for coal paralysis works for bituminous coal’ or something.
- Finding #3. This type of model could be extended to computational fluid dynamics programs. Just stuff like that. That reason that using these findings and headings is a good move is that they’re very keyword dense.
Chris Cloney: 08:49
You can see some of the things I’m saying like coal, paralysis, or whatever the keywords are: they’re very keyword heavy because it comes directly from the paper and that’s good for your blog’s SEO as well.
We’ve covered the first four parts of the template: the introduction, the image, the four paragraphs and the three main findings- one section for each and then two or three sentences describing the main finding.
The last section, which has its own heading, is my personal takeaway from the paper title. We’ll talk about why we include the paper title here in a little bit when we get to the SEO quality for these sorts of posts. After that, write your conclusions. You can link through to related literature, related literature posts you’ve done, related three-minute papers that you’ve done and reference the paper that you’re doing.
Chris Cloney: 09:34
These are the five sections for your template. I created this using HTML back when I got started. I think you can use the WordPress editor to create a template that will work well. Once you have it, you can use it again and again. I will include the example of my template in the show notes at gradblogger.com/11. You can download it there.
Step 2 – Every time you read write notes on the back
The second step is writing notes on the back every time you read a paper. They can be pretty simple: things like paper goals or methods. Jot down two to three sentences or two or three points that you’ll turn into sentences as the three main findings.
Chris Cloney: 10:21
You want to highlight these because they will go into your blog post, along with your conclusions or your big takeaways. If you just jot these down in the back of the paper while you’re reading it, you’ll have a stack of input for creating this three-minute post.
Step 3 – Every Morning Write for the First 30 Minutes of Your Day
Step number three is to write for the first 30 minutes of your day. This is what I did and I found it helpful. I would start working on my website for 30 minutes every day and then I’d put it away until I got my graduate school work done because my Ph.D. thesis was building this website.
Chris Cloney: 10:51
With regards to picking a time, it doesn’t have to be the first 30 minutes or the first hour of a day, but picking some time where you’re going to be creating these posts every day is important. I would sit down at my computer, pull a paper from the stack, flip it over, look at my notes and start typing up paper goals, methods, finding number one, finding number two, finding number three, conclusions.
Chris Cloney: 11:13
I got to the point where I could start to do one to two, well, one to 1.5 of these paper posts in this 30-minute slot, which helped me ramp up and get more done. I was posting five a week, or one every weekday.
Step 4 – One Afternoon Per Week (Or Weekend) Finalize Posts
Step number six is to spend one afternoon per week or on the weekend finalizing the posts. Create your images, set the SEO parameters (which we’ll talk about in a little bit), set your metadata and all that sort of stuff, and get your posts ready to go.
Step 5 – Schedule To Post And Share On Social Media
Step number five is to schedule your posts for released and share it on social media. I use the free version of Buffer for this. Every weekday I’d send out one of my posts. Now you also can put them on recycle and schedule them for different times.
Chris Cloney: 12:00
Those are the five steps to creating three-minute papers. You can already see how formulaic it is, but it gets easy because you become quick at doing these sort of things.
- Step one: Create a template and use it over and over again.
- Step two: Every time you read a paper, put notes on the back.
- Step three: Every morning, start your day by writing for 30 minutes.
- Step four: Spend one afternoon per week finalizing the posts.
- Step five: Scheduling and share on social media.
You will look like a giant content creation machine if you follow these steps, but it’s only costing you 30 minutes a day and you’re writing notes on papers that you’re already reading for your Ph.D. thesis anyway.
Five major benefits of TMPP
Chris Cloney: 12:36
I want to talk about the five major benefits of three-minute paper posts.
The first major benefit is that you get quick at content creation. As I said, I reached the point where I could do one to almost two full paper write-ups in half an hour. If I spent an hour, I could almost get through my whole week of paper write-ups, so you can get far ahead.
Benefit number two is it exercises both your writing and content-shipping muscles. It also exercises your confidence. When you get started writing and pressing ‘ship’, it is the hardest thing to do. Imposter syndrome kicks in, and it can cripple you and stop you for days. If you use this process, it’s the same five steps. You just keep doing it and you know that every morning for the first half an hour of your day, you’re going to be writing. You’re going to be creating content, putting it to the world. It doesn’t matter what going to come out of it.
Chris Cloney: 13:22
I will guarantee you if you do it for a couple of months, you’ll be amazed at the opportunities. that’s the second major benefit, practices you’re writing and shipping content muscles.
The third major benefit is that cross-linking is baked right in. As I stated, you can include other, related literature and you can point to other paper summaries that you wrote. When somebody’s reading your work, they may say, “Oh, this was interesting and helpful. You know, I’ll look at this other paper that’s been summarized on the website.”
Chris Cloney: 13:50
The fourth major benefit is that content stacking is baked right in. Again, if you do 10 of these paper summaries it’s easy to create a literature survey by pulling out the five major points from 10 different literature sources. I used to do this to create a literature summary posts from it. I’d do the industry-relevant terms or industry-relevant information and post that on LinkedIn.
Chris Cloney: 14:14
That helped drive people back to my website. This was a great formula for where I ended up going, which was the industrial impact of science and research into dust explosions, which is basically my business today.
The fifth major benefit is that it’s easy to optimize for search engines. People spend a lot of time doing keyword research. You start looking at how to do SEO properly and soon your head will probably start to spin. I’m going to explain exactly how to optimize these posts for SEO and show you how easy it is. You don’t have to think at all about trying to optimize things, but you will start getting people coming back to your website because what do people look for when they want to find a paper?
Chris Cloney: 15:01
As I turn on my computer, go to Google and type the name of the paper or the closest thing I can remember for the name of that paper, I’ll find it. I might also go to a directory that’s going to have it.
When you type the name of the paper, it will generally appear first followed by a review. What do you think people are going to click on? A lot of people will say, “Oh, there’s a review of this paper.” They’ll click in it and that’ll bring them back into your website and into your ecosystem where you can get them more familiar with what you’re doing.
How to optimize TMPP for Search Engines?
I want to talk now about five important things regarding search engine optimization of your posts and how these can be baked right into the three-minute paper. They are:
- Picking a keyword for your topic: something that will draw attention through organic search.
- Including that keyword in your post name.
- Including it in the image alt tag.
- Including it in at least one heading
- Including it in the meta description.
I cover this a little bit more in a post called How to Write 40 Blog Posts in 56 Days, which is all about this three-minute paper process.
The first thing you do is pick a keyword from the paper’s title, which is generally easy because people include keywords in titles. If your keyword is flame propagation or whatever, just look at the title of the paper and say, “Okay, what’s the keyword I want to use here?” Titles are very keyword dense so you can pull that out. That is your keyword. As for your post name, the keyword is already included because you’re writing a review of the paper title.
Chris Cloney: 17:17
In the image alt tag, you have a quote. The image is a quote from your paper, but you can put the name of the paper as the image file: “name of paper.png.” When you upload it, add alt tags that include the paper name and again, that keyword will be included without having to think about how to include it in your post.
It’s also included in one heading because the last heading of your post will be “Review of” or “My personal takeaway from the” (paper name) if you follow the template that I provide. Then finally, in the meta description, you can put the paper name.
Chris Cloney: 18:00
The post will start to generate authority with those type of keywords right away. If you write 40 or 50 of these over a short period, you’ll start to rank for great keywords in your space. If you think of the paper titles that you’re reading every day, pick one or two keywords from each, and write these into the post, you start to build up authority in that space through social media, search engines, and organic search. This is a great way to have SEO baked right into your website.
Report Card: Three Minute Paper Posts
Chris Cloney: 18:42
I’m going to close out this episode by giving the report card for three-minute papers. We did this last time for random topic blogging, which had 63% for content creation and 40% for content distribution.
For three minute papers, under content creation, we have difficulty, complexity, SEO value, and scalability, so four parameters. For difficulty, I gave this a three, so this is the highest rating. These get easy. There’s no other way to write a 300 to 500-word blog post in under 30 minutes or under an hour, optimize it, and get it up on the website in an hour and a half. It’s the simplest way to get started on creating a massive amount of content in your space.
As for complexity, it’s pretty simple as well. You create your template and then for that you’re just writing. You’re writing a word doc and then you copy and paste it. There aren’t any complicated processes. The most complicated thing is probably using some app to create your quote, but you can just Google “free app to create quote.” You’ll type in the quote you want. You can change the background colours or whatever and export to a PNG or JPEG.
Number three is SEO value. Again, we’re going to give this a three as well. It’s very easy to make these highly relevant from an SEO perspective. You may get stuck with the keywords that are in the paper titles, but over time, as you do a lot of these, you’ll start to rank for a lot of different keywords.
Number four is scalability. This is quite easy to do. Right out of the gate, I was getting up to five posts a week, or one every weekday. Niklas Goeke uses the same process to do 365 posts a year, which is a lot. You will start to burn out at those rates, but it’s easy to scale up quickly using this approach.
If you are following along, then that is 16 out of 16 for content creation. These are the easiest types of posts you can do. It gets an A+ for content creation on its report card.
For content distribution, we have ship, show, stack, share, and number of different mediums as their parameters. For shipping, I gave it a three. It’s easy to put these out. You can put share buttons on them, but you can just use Buffer and have one go out every day so you don’t have to worry about scheduling.
Chris Cloney: 20:57
To show and to get it into the world, I gave it a two. It’s easy to get these out there. They have an image, so you can use that as the featured image, and the quote could pull people in.
For the stack content, I gave it a three. This is easy, stackable content. It’s great for putting in newsletters. You can use the five posts you did last week. It’s also great for putting together into literature surveys, pulling out key insights from literature surveys, and putting on different mediums like different websites, LinkedIn or wherever.
For number four, which is sharing, I gave this a one. These paper summaries are probably not the most insightful thing for people to share over and over again. I put it on the low end. In some fields, it may be more common than others, but it may be perceived as low-value content due to the amount that you’re putting out there.
Chris Cloney: 21:46
For a number of mediums, which is the last parameter for distribution, this gets a one. It’s only in the written medium, although, there’s no reason why you couldn’t create an audio version and even a video version if you’d like, which would add some more steps to your process. But that might be an interesting way to do it. Show the paper and go through it that way as well.
Chris Cloney: 22:05
So, on content distribution, we have a 10 out of 50 so a 50%, which just gets the passing grade for content distribution.
To recap: in content creation we gave an A+. They got 100%. It’s very easy to create these types of posts and their value comes from doing a lot of them. There’s not a ton of value in each one, but by the time I was done with my thesis, I was going to my website and looking up these review posts so that I could remember what the literature was for each of the different pieces and use it to write a lot of my thesis.
Chris Cloney: 22:43
In bulk or en masse, these can be quite valuable, but individually they may be low value and that may hurt the content distribution. They may be harder to get out there and the medium is only written unless you create audio and video.
Conclusion
With that, we’re going to close out this episode of GradBlogger. As I mentioned, this is the second episode in the Content Machine series. If you want to look at, listen to the other episodes, you can go to the show notes gradblogger.com/11 and we’ll link to the previous ones as well as any future ones that are in the same series.
If you like this episode and the concept of three-minute papers you can tag me on Twitter or Instagram @GradBlogger and talk about it. You can use the hashtag TMPP and share what you learned from this episode. Definitely tag me so I can respond and see that come through as well.
Chris Cloney: 23:31
If you’re interested in the transcripts from this episode, we have these in the show notes at gradblogger.com/11. We also include the actual template that I use for my 40 blog posts in 56 days, so you can download and modify it for your own three-minute paper summaries.
As always, I appreciate you listening to the GradBlogger Podcast. I hope you have a great week ahead and I’m looking forward to continuing to help you build your online business, your side hustle, your research company, and help you escape academia if that’s what you’re looking to do. I’m looking forward to doing more interviews and solo episodes as well as helping you continue to build your online presence and business.
