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In this episode of GradBlogger, we answer listener questions that have been submitted by email, social media, and direct message. We also discuss ways that you can create the right content and connect with an audience without getting overwhelmed, and talk about whether you should trademark your blog name and your business.
Disclosure: me 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 #28 of GradBlogger, where we’re helping academics change the world through online business. We show you how to use your Ph.D. and experience to start blogging, podcasting, shooting video, and getting involved online so you can build a business and make your dent in the universe. I’m your host, Dr. Chris Cloney.
Chris Cloney: 00:31
Today’s episode is a bit different than the ones we’ve had before, as we are going through and answering listener questions.
We’ve been collecting feedback sent via email, social media and DM, so I have this big list of questions. If you’re enjoying this episode or if you enjoyed any of the previous episodes, I want to encourage you to leave your own questions in regards to building a blog around science, research, your academic degree or your expertise.
What do you struggle with? Building a team, or building a business around that blog, or monetizing, or creating a profit, or all these hard things that we discuss on the podcast. Where are you stuck at today?
Chris Cloney: 01:14
If you are stuck in one certain area and have questions, you can go to GradBlogger.com/ask. We’ll have a way for you to ask questions there. It will probably be a form field. We’ll also likely include something like SpeakPipe so you can just leave your questions verbally. Leave your name and your website. If you do, we may feature you on the podcast as well.
Chris Cloney: 01:41
Again, these questions have come from people reaching out to ask about their blogs, their research, and how they can move those forward. We’ve collected some of those for this episode. If you want to ask your own question, go to Gradblogger.com/ask. If you want to learn more about something in this episode, you can always download the transcripts. You can do this at the show notes at Gradblogger.com/28.
I am Struggling to Create Content and Connect with an Audience
Chris Cloney: 02:09
We’ll get right into the questions now. There are three lined up for this episode.
The first one is:
Hi Chris, I’m struggling to create content and connect with an audience. What are the first steps to get going with your blog once you have your website set up?
This is something we have talked about quite a bit on the podcast, and there are three big points or three key areas that I want to highlight.
You Need The Right Content
Chris Cloney: 02:30
The first is that your content needs to be the right content. We’ll give an example of how this could go wrong. We’ll talk about where success comes from, which is building a repeatable, sustainable process that you can grow over time and continue to keep doing. And number three, we’ll talk about content curation as being a strategy that’s really good in the early days.
Chris Cloney: 02:51
The first point is that the content you’re creating needs to be the right type. Sometimes we talk to somebody who wants to write about a specific science area, but their content targets other content writers. They have a blog about how to write a post. But if they’re using that blog to get gigs for science writing, that content is not for their target audience. Their target audience is people who want stuff written about the topic.
Chris Cloney: 03:33
I hope that makes sense. It needs to be the right content. If you write about about astrophysics, then the content of your blog should not be about content writing. It should be about astrophysics so you can attract people who are interested in the topic and encourage them to see you as an authority. Then they’ll be more likely to hire you.
Chris Cloney: 03:57
That’s just one example. You need to sit down and think, “Okay, here’s my audience. What questions do they have? Where do they hang out?”
It’s similar to what I’m doing with this episode right now: bringing in questions from the GradBlogger audience and answering them here. That’s great content because we know they’re asking these questions. So, that’s point number one: it needs to be the right content that you’re creating.
Build a Repeatable and Sustainable Process
Chris Cloney: 04:22
Point number two is that success comes from building a repeatable, sustainable process that targets this correct audience.
This comes back to building content machines. We talked about them in earlier episodes of the podcast, specifically Episode #8, which was about using random topic blogging. This is how most people get started, and some people stay there for their entire blogging career.
It’s a weekly struggle when you keep saying, “Okay, I need to think of this new topic.” I encourage you to not do it that way. Researching, writing, formatting a post, finding an image, uploading the post to the website, and sharing it through social media is hard to do every week. I recommend developing processes to build content that is going to be valuable to your field.
Chris Cloney: 05:10
In Episode #11, we talked about using three-minute papers to drive traffic back to your site. These are article summaries specifically on your research area. They help build you as an authority while providing you with an easy, structured, systematic way to build content each week.
In Episode #24, we talked about content curation and repurposing, which covered how you can use those content curation systems to enhance, collect, and verify that information to make it more valuable for your audience.
We have more ideas on this and more content machines that we’re testing out through DustSafetyScience and GradBlogger. We’ll be sharing these on the podcast as well. If you go to any of those previous episodes, we have links to everything that’s been published in the Content Machine Series. So, if you’re listening to this in the future, we’ll have future posts in that series as well.
Chris Cloney: 06:00
That’s point number two: success comes from building a scalable, repeatable process. If you have to put a lot of thought into what you’re going to do each week, you’re really going to struggle after three months, or six months, or two years of doing that. At some point, it’s going to start to fall apart.
Content Curation is Important
Chris Cloney: 06:18
To summarize: point number one is that it needs to be the right content. Point number two is that it needs to be repeatable, sustainable, scalable process. Point number three is that, in the early days, content curation is a huge part.
If you’re struggling to create content during your early days, it’s much better to go out and curate material. Get the best blog posts and latest news in your research field. A list of the topic-relevant journal papers that were published in the last month might be a great thing to share in your newsletter. That way, your readers find high value and they will probably read your newsletter more frequently.
Chris Cloney: 06:59
That’s a really huge example there. What could you be collecting and sharing with your audience that they would find really high value but you don’t have to create yourself? This also gives you stuff to share on social media, builds you up as an authority in your space, and provides many other benefits.
When you’re starting your blog, you need to practice that shipping muscle. Building authority mostly comes from sharing other people’s content and being seen as a person who shares stuff.
Chris Cloney: 07:32
Those are my three tips for you if you’re struggling to create content and connect with an audience. Number one: it needs to be the right content. Number two: success comes from building a scalable, sustainable, and repeatable process that’s not going to burn you out over time. And number three: in the early days, becoming a content curator is just as good as becoming a content creator.
Don’t only curate content. You need to be creating your own spin and developing your own material. But if you also curate content, it will give you more insight on what you can be sharing and how frequently you should be sharing. It also gives you the material to beef up your newsletter so it looks more impressive and is more helpful to the audience that you’re building.
Question #2: Struggling with Being Overwhelmed By the Number of Moving Parts
Chris Cloney: 08:12
Looking at my notes here, I see that question number two deals with struggling. It’s a longer question, but the main point is that the individual is struggling with being overwhelmed by the number of moving parts with starting a blog, and thinking about the long term business. They don’t know what to do first. They’re struggling with the complexity of building this thing out.
Chris Cloney: 08:35
If you’ve read [Affiliate] The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo or been watching the Netflix series, you’ll understand that the big thing is to get it all out there. Don’t have all those ideas rattling around in your brain. You will go nuts if you keep them there for months at a time and are trying to figure out what to do. Every day you sit down and think, “Okay, what’s the thing I’ve got to pull out of my head today?”
Chris Cloney: 09:07
Write down everything you have. There are a couple of ways to do this. You can use Post-It notes to write them out. I used to do this back in the early days with my DustExplosionResearch.com. I would write each idea and each thought on a Post-It note and then move those around on my floor. Then I take a big picture of it. I probably have some notes in my old folders that I can pull out and put in a future episode. So, that’s one way to do it.
Chris Cloney: 09:32
Whiteboards are excellent for this. You can write things down, you can erase them, you can move items, and you can draw arrows. I do this type of brainstorming all the time. There’s even software that you can use, like Trello, which we use for project management at GradBlogger and DustSafetyScience. You can also use specific mind-mapping software. The whole point is to get it all out there.
Chris Cloney: 09:54
This is similar to what Marie Kondo recommends. If you want to tidy up your closet, take every piece of clothing and throw it all on the bed so you can get this big mass of stuff in front of you and go, “Wow. Look how big this is. Look how much stuff there is.” But at least it’s out of your head. Then you can start looking, picking through, and thinking, “Okay. Well, maybe that’s not as important right now.”
I think she has a specific question, which is, “How much joy does this bring to you?” You can start talking like that as well and see which elements of that gigantic list are the most important. Identify the ones that gets you the most excited and have the biggest bang for your buck and ignore everything else. Take two weeks or a month and do that first thing.
Chris Cloney: 10:39
There’s a good story about this. It involves a film producer who couldn’t sleep because he had so many ideas for all of his films. I regret that I can’t think of his name right now, but the story just popped into my head.
Chris Cloney: 10:57
He had a nightstand beside his bed. Every time he had one of these thoughts, he’d write it on a piece of paper, throw it in the nightstand and then never think about it again. He had this whole nightstand full of ideas for movies and scenes. If he ever wanted to go back and revisit them, he would just open up his nightstand, pull out one of the ideas, and go to town on it or go through and sort them.
That’s the key. When you have these ideas, write them down, get them out of your head, and they’ll seem less important. Then you can figure out which ones are the best ones to do.
Chris Cloney: 11:30
If you’re struggling with being overwhelmed, that’s my number one tip. Write everything down. Make a mind map, pick one thing and move towards that. Then pick the next thing and move towards that. If you’re stuck in this process, do the mind map trick. If you don’t do that, then you’re not going to get as far.
Do the mind map trick and send it to me at Chris@GradBlogger.com. You can even upload it at the show notes, or tag me on social media @GradBlogger, and we can talk about the best way to get through that feeling of being overwhelmed, so you can build your blog and potentially a business that can change the world.
Question #3: Should I Trademark My Blog Name Or Business Assets?
Chris Cloney: 12:04
That’s question number two: struggling around being overwhelmed by the number of moving parts in your business. Question number three is: should I trademark my blog name or any other parts of my business? Should I create a trade name?
Chris Cloney: 12:41
I’ve been asked this question a couple of times. I’ll give you my thoughts on the answer. I’m not a lawyer, but I have talked to one about this topic, so, I’m just relaying the information as I understand it. It’s not legal advice.
For most people I talk to, this question is a crutch that they’re using, either consciously or unconsciously, to avoid taking a difficult next step, whether it be selling something, asking somebody to do something, sharing on social media, or creating a piece of content. If you have this question, ask yourself: “Is this me putting a block in the way to stop me from doing something hard?”
In a lot of cases, I found the answer to be yes. But it is also a legit question, I guess. So we’ll go into what the answer might be.
Chris Cloney: 13:31
I did this for my company, DustSafetyScience. To see if I should trademark the blog name and some of the other assets that we create, I spoke to a lawyer. The outcome was that it would cost $3,500 Canadian and take two years. This was a lot of money to me at the time and it was a long lead time, so trademarking didn’t make a lot of sense for me.
Chris Cloney: 14:03
This is just my two cents, but there are only two cases where it can come into play: somebody is already using that name and they sue you, or someone uses that name in the future and you want to sue them. Those are the only two cases where this trademark infringement comes in. In both cases, you need to have pretty deep pockets to defend the lawsuit or to do the lawsuit.
Chris Cloney: 14:38
The other point is that even if you trademark the name, both of these things can happen anyway. If you trademark your name and someone sues you, it’s going to cost just as much to defend that. It’s not like you show them your trademark and you’re done. If a company really wants to sue you about this, then you have to go to court. You have to hire a lawyer. It’s going to cost you thousands more and lots more time.
That’s a risk you take when you’re starting your business. It’s unlikely to happen. And it’s just as unlikely to happen if you already have it trademarked.
Chris Cloney: 15:07
So, that’s my point. Trademarking is only useful in these two cases: if somebody is already using it and they sue you, in which case you still need to go through the legal process, and if someone is using it in the future and you want to sue them. But the cost is really high at the start. The lead times are really high. And again, this can happen anyway. It’s just a risk that you take.
Chris Cloney: 15:28
When I did my analysis of these trademarking elements, I concluded that it wasn’t worth it for me and my business. It was only going to cost a couple of hundred dollars if I want to change my business name in the future. It would also be a pretty quick process. This is what I told that individual when they asked whether they should trademark their blog name or business.
Conclusion
Chris Cloney: 15:53
So, that’s it for this episode. It’s a shorter one, but I just wanted to go through some of the questions that we’ve been asked. We started with what you should do when you’re struggling to create content and connect with an audience. Then we discussed how to deal with being overwhelmed by the number of moving parts involved in building a blog. We talked about whether you should trademark your blog name and your business.
Chris Cloney: 16:09
I hope you found this listener Q & A episode useful and interesting. These may be some of the questions you’re asking yourself when you’re getting started in your business. If you did find it helpful or if you’re enjoying the content that we’re creating through GraDBlogger, please go to GradBlogger.com or GradBlogger on iTunes and rate and review the podcast. It really helps.
Chris Cloney: 16:27
If you have any feedback, you can tag me on social media @GradBlogger on Twitter and Instagram. I would also encourage you to go to GradBlogger.com/ask and submit any questions you have about building your blog and your business or how to become self-tenured like I’m doing with DustSafetyScience.
These are the things I want to be helping people with, namely graduate students, people with PhDs, professors, and academics. Please go to GrabBlogger.com/ask and ask any questions you have on this whole process. I look forward to talking again next week with the next episode of GradBlogger.
Resources
Companies:
DustSafetyScience
GradBlogger: Twitter | Instagram
Books:
[Affiliate] Kondo, Marie. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
Previous Podcasts:
GBP023- Content curation and repurposing (The Content Machine Series)
GBP011- Using three-minute papers to drive traffic to your site (The Content Machine series)
GBP008- Using random topic blogging as your first content machine (The Content Machine Series)
