What it takes to run PhD Talk

A reader recently asked me how much time I spend on this blog.

My first estimate is that it takes me about 6 hours a week. I tend to write on Sunday afternoon, Tuesday evening, and Friday evening. In those time slots, I also reply emails, schedule podcast interviews, write shownotes, and other blog-related tasks. At some point during the week, there is usually also a podcast recording.

I went back in my time logs of 2021, and learned that I spend anywhere between 5 and 44 hours a month on the blog. The months I spent most time on the blog, are the months I spent developing material for the PhD Talk courses. And then there are months that I just lean back and let my backlog of posts do its job.

In terms of content, I still create a lot: two blog posts a week, one podcast a week, some long twitter threads, visual content for Instagram, and the occasional Facebook live. And of course, the content of my courses and invited presentations on topics related to this blog. I enjoy creating content. I’m not good at promoting my own content.

Most of what you see on PhD Talk is my own writing. Sometimes I have a guest post. The podcast is a two cohost adventure. When I moved to WordPress, I also hired a webmaster.

Besides the time I pour into this project, I also have a number of paid services. Besides the webmaster I already mentioned, I pay for the hosting of this website, and the hosting of the podcast content. Eventually, I hope to be able to compensate these costs with the sales of courses, and paid speaking gigs – but I am nowhere there yet.

With this brief summary, I hope you got an idea of what it takes in terms of time and money to run this website. The most important though, is that I enjoy writing content and developing this blog – more than anything, this blog is hobby of mine.