Elevate Your Academic Profile

Ready to transform your academic research into a powerful brand? Join us as Dr. Sheena Howard, founder of Power Your Research, unveils the entrepreneurial steps to boost your visibility, authority, and income. Discover how to break free from academic paywalls and create a lasting legacy through strategic brand-building. 

Follow Dr. Sheena Howards' socials:
@drsheenahoward | Power Your Research

Chapters

• 0:00 Building Your Brand as an Academic
• 6:29 Creating Authentic Content for Academic Branding

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

You gotta have a reason for why you want to leave this legacy, why you want to get your work in front of people outside of academe, so you can leave your legacy, so that you can impact the people that you are actually researching and writing about. I don't want my work to be stuck behind an academic paywall. I want to leave a legacy, I want to reach my potential and I want to change lives. This podcast, power your Research, is my attempt to help the smartest people in the world do that very thing. My hope is that you use the lessons I share to make more money than what your higher ed job can ever pay you. I've done it, my clients have done it, and so can you. My hope is that you'll apply what you learn here and one day join the Power your Research program, where you can work with me one-on-one. Work with me one-on-one. I want to give you three things to incorporate into your journey to building a big brand. So, if you're new here, my name is Dr Sheena Howard. I'm the founder of Power your Research, an academic branding company, and I help academics increase their visibility, authority and income without the expense of a publicist. So I'm going to give you just three things that you can take action on right now to moving towards building a big brand right and really getting your work out there so it's not stuck behind an academic paywall or behind a paid journal article or in the basement of a library. So the first thing is you want to understand that building a brand is entrepreneurship. So, as academics, we're used to the roadmap. We're used to taking the classes and getting the degree and following the instructions and having the whole roadmap laid out for us, but in terms of building your brand, there is no specific roadmap. You are the roadmap and so it's very important that you have coaches and it's very important that you follow the steps of other people that have done the thing that you are trying to do, but their exact steps are not the exact steps that you can follow. So I've taken tons of courses, I've spent thousands and thousands of dollars on coaches and they've all been helpful for different aspects of my journey, and so I can look back and tell you my roadmap and my method. And you have to go on that same journey as well to build your roadmap, and it's really important when you're hiring coaches and taking classes, that you spend money on people that actually have the result that you want. Okay, so the first thing is you have to be willing to go the distance. If you want to increase your visibility, increase your authority, authority, get your research in front of the world, right, you have to be able to go the distance and be willing to do the work, because it isn't easy. People are promising you, you know, 30 days to do this and nine steps to do this. One of the things that I hone in on with my clients is that you got to have a purpose. You got to have a reason for why you want to leave this legacy, why you want to get your work in front of people outside of academe, so you can leave your legacy, so that you can impact the people that you are actually researching and writing about. So the first thing is you just got to be willing to go the distance if you want to move from having a PhD to leveraging that out here in the marketplace and really building that big brand that you deserve to have.

Speaker 1: 3:45

The second thing is outsourcing. Now, this is a big one for my academics, because in higher ed, right, we're taught that outsourcing is cheating, right? Nobody else can write your paper. Right, you can't hire somebody to do your work, but in building a brand, you do have to outsource. It's too much work to do, you know, and it is hyper competitive in these social media streets and in these internet streets, and so you can't do it all on your own. And that's super important because you are competing in a marketplace of other people that are building big brands. But if you have a PhD, you're still a small percentage of the population. I know in our PhD world it seems like everybody has a PhD, but the fact of the matter is you still have leverage on people that don't. You're still a small part of the world and you have something that you can leverage.

Speaker 1: 4:36

Hey, everyone, real quick. I don't run any ads on this podcast, so I have to rely on word of mouth. If this podcast has helped you in any way, please share it with a friend and follow me, dr Sheena Howard, on LinkedIn, where I give more free content on building your brand as an academic. If you tell me you came to my LinkedIn from the podcast, I'll make sure I accept your request. You're competing against a lot of people and so you need to outsource. It's not one of those things where you can do it all alone, which is why I share all of my outsourcing resources and editors and VAs with the people that are inside my Power, your Research program, so you can have access to people that are going to help you to get to the next level at a very, very affordable rates Right, but, more importantly, people that know what they're doing to help you get there.

Speaker 1: 5:27

I had a client today and she's building her Instagram page and she wants to outsource her Instagram content and I had to tell her you got to take a step back, because you can't outsource something that you don't know how to run yourself. So you can't outsource your social media content If you don't know who your target audience is and what type of content they like. You can't do that because you don't know yet, and that's why it's really important to understand at the beginning with social media content know who your audience is and how to reach them and how to talk to them, and then you can outsource the content to someone else. I know that we're all eager to have somebody else do it because we don't want to be bothered, but you know, social media can be a really, really tricky thing and you need to know the ins and outs of your audience before you outsource that part. Ok, so the third thing that I want to talk about in terms of going from a PhD someone who's an academic, to building a big brand, is content creation Right, so we touched on it a little bit a moment ago, but just some tips on content creation.

Speaker 1: 6:29

You have to create content, right. You have to be out here creating videos, creating images. Now, you can do this in a way that is real to you, right. Your brand doesn't have to look like someone else's. You don't necessarily have to go live all the time and do it the way that is real to you, right. Your brand doesn't have to look like someone else's. You don't necessarily have to go live all the time and do it the way that someone else is doing it. You're going to do it in the way that matches your personality. But in my experience, all the clients that I work with, especially you know my PhDs you are going to have to get out of your comfort zone to really dig into the content, because the content is the thing that's going to get you the visibility. The content is the thing that's going to draw more of the media attention, the income, the platform, right, and so you know.

Speaker 1: 7:10

One big takeaway that I can share with you is to be yourself. Create content for your target audience, but be yourself Because typically, the thing that you're trying to sell or the thing that you want to enroll people in, you've learned something and you've been the person that you're trying to help, and so think about the person that you were before and create content for that person. What did that person need back then, before you are who you are today? So be yourself and create content. You have to compete out here, and those are the three tips that I can share with you today on moving from a PhD to having a big brand.

Speaker 1: 7:51

I hope that this was helpful. If you're not ready to jump into the Power, your Research program and invest in coaching with me, grab the academic branding book. It's a nine-step system, right, it's the power, your research program in a book. You can read it, you can follow along, you can get results. You can get to six figures just with the stuff that's in the book and just based off of the expertise that you currently have you.