The Top 5 (Organic) Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Value Ladder
By Connor
Last week, we talked about how your value ladder IS your business. It serves as the roadmap for everything you’ll create (from products to content) and how you structure your business.
And while that’s true, your value ladder means NOTHING if you can’t get people into it. Traffic is the first step in this entire process. Fortunately, that’s exactly what we’re looking at this week.
In one way or another, EVERYTHING comes back to content at some point. It’s the reality of the world we live in today. So naturally, as Ladder Creators, we have to put a lot of emphasis on not only the quality of our content, but also the strategy behind what we want it to do.
For the letter this week, I analyzed dozens of top creators to figure out what the best ways to drive people to your value ladder are. Here’s a quick overview of what you can expect
- Content Flywheel
- Leveraging authority
- Lead magnets (with a twist)
- Creator Collabs
- Teaser Posts
Some of these tactics are more useful with a larger audience, but you should be able to implement all of them in some capacity no matter what stage you’re at. Just know that these things compound, so as your audience grows, so will the effectiveness of each of these tactics.
Where to Start Your Value Ladder
Before we get in to the specific tactics that each of these creators uses to drive people up their value ladder, I want to show you a few quotes:
My newsletter has grown from 0 to 125k+ in 77 weeks. And since launching, revenue has increased by 305%.
Email marketing has proven 3500% ROI. In other words, starting your own newsletter is perhaps the most important growth lever you could pull for your brand.
It’s the engine of every dollar you are going to make on the internet with your writing. Period. Full stop. End of discussion.
The difference between $10K a month and $50-200K a month as a creator can be as simple as newsletter, repurpose, iterate, and be patient.
If there's one hill I will die on, it's that all creators should include email as part of their creative platform. And I'm not alone on that hill – it's actually pretty crowded.
Once you’ve built and are running a digital business you realize your newsletter is everything. The whole business.
6 MASSIVE creators basically saying the same thing. As a creator, the number one most impactful thing you can do is start a newsletter.
That is where your value ladder starts. If you can’t get people into your newsletter, you can’t start bringing them up your value ladder (unless you use a coaching ladder and sell EXCLUSIVELY on social media, which I would NOT recommend).
Keep that in mind as you read through this. Every value ladder starts with a newsletter, so your overall content strategy should primarily be focused on getting people into your newsletter.
1. Content Fly Wheel
The goal of Ladder Creators is to create something once and benefit from it forever. Over time, we’re able to significantly decrease our workload because of the digital assets that we’ve built (audience, digital products, newsletter). And when you implement a content flywheel, you can amplify the impact of every single digital asset that you create.
The concept of a content fly wheel is relatively simple: Use organic socials to promote your newsletter and link back to your organic socials IN your newsletter:
Let’s say you make a LinkedIn post, but only a certain percentage of your email list saw that original post. When you an include a link to the original post in your newsletter, some people will go check that post out. That leads to more engagement on the original LinkedIn post. Now, the algorithm is going to boost the post so that more people see it. And when more people see it, more people sign up for your newsletter and make their way into your ecosystem.
Dickie Bush uses this strategy not only in newsletters, but also directly on his website:
He takes all of his best performing tweets and LinkedIn posts and embeds them on his website. Now anybody who visits his website (either from socials or organic search) can read those tweets, go interact with them on Twitter (I refuse to call it X), increase their reach, and drive even more people back to his website and newsletter.
Dan Koe does something very similar in his newsletter. He will link tweets, YouTube videos, and now his book within the newsletter to drive more traffic to each of those channels. And as he gets more traffic to those channels, his presence increases, which drives even more people back to his newsletter where he can get people into his ecosystem and start ascending them up his value ladder.
Here’s an example of him linking back to his book, YouTube video, and a tweet:
2. Leveraging Authority
This is BY FAR my favorite strategy on this list because it is so damn impactful, and you can start implementing it at ANY level. All you have to do is use people who are already known and have massive authority. Then you use their audience and authority to build your own
There are a number of benefits to this approach, but I want to highlight the top 2:
- In his book Influence, Robert Cialdini says authority is one of the least utilized persuasion techniques – simple put, people trust experts (think of doctors, attorneys, or firefighters). By simply associating yourself with pre-built authority, YOU become more authoritative. And when it comes time to move people up your value ladder, they already know, like, and trust you, which is why you don’t need to use any of the pushy marketing tactics that traditional digital marketers use.
- You learn from those people by studying them. This is my favorite benefit. You start to see what all of the best have in common and how you can start replicating that yourself so you can also level up
If you follow me on LinkedIn, you know I use this strategy a lot. Hell, I’m doing it right now (and I do it in most of my newsletters!). It’s SO much easier to prove a point or demonstrate a concept when you have proof from massive creators who people already think of as authority figures.
Look at the screenshots from past LinkedIn posts I put together leveraging other people’s authority:
They went absolutely BANANAS. That was 3 posts in a 12 day span that popped off. And only 8 of those 12 posts leveraged pre-built authority. So the numbers are even crazier when you think about it: 3 out of 8 posts that leveraged pre-built authority went nuts in terms of impressions. That led to hundreds of new followers and a few dozen newsletter subscribers (if you want to check out those posts, you can find them here, here, and here).
Like I said, this is an INCREDIBLY useful strategy when you’re trying to grow a following and build your own authority in a particular niche. But even people at the tip top are doing it too.
Alex Hormozi is a MASTER at using other people’s authority to build his own. Take a look at these YouTube thumbnails:
Hormozi has MASSIVE authority in his own right, and he STILL leverages the familiarity and authority of other popular people to build his own. That’s part of the reason he’s been able to grow a 5M+ person audience in under 2 years (having SO much authority himself and a massive team helps as well, but you get the point).
One final note on authority – Codie Sanchez did this exact same thing when she was first growing Contrarian Thinking. She got on every podcast she could and leveraged the hosts’ audience and perceived authority to build her own, grow her newsletter, and start getting people into her value ladder.
3. Lead Magnets (With a Twist)
I have a love/hate relationship with lead magnets. If used correctly, they can lead to a TON of quality subscribers and really blow up your email list. But used incorrectly, and you’ll just get a bunch of freebie seekers who don’t read your newsletter and will never move up your value ladder. For a killer breakdown on lead magnets, check out this article from The Writer Creator Newsletter
That being said, I do like the strategy that Yannick Veys (founder of Hypefury) and Brian Blum (co-host of Sweat Equity podcast) use to drive more newsletter subs.
It feels WAY more personal than simply sending your audience to a landing page to grab a free product. At the bottom of posts, they will ask people to comment a specific word to receive the lead magnet. Then they set up an automation workflow in Hypefury that sends a semi-personalized message with the lead magnet to anybody who comments that word.
Here’s an example of Yannick using it and the resulting impact it had on his newsletter list:
And here’s an example of Brain doing it (unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything on how this impacted his email list).
Let’s look at the Yannick example for a moment. Almost 550 new subscribers from 1 lead magnet in 1 day. If only 10% of those people ever end up becoming customers, that’s 55 new people he can now start bringing up his value ladder. Not too shabby for 1 tweet.
4. Creator Collabs
This is another highly effective traffic lever, BUT it does depend on how big your audience is. There is certainly a chance to collaborate on something with a creator who is larger than you, but in the majority of situations, creator collabs are best done with people who have a similar audience size as you.
The true benefit here is that you get to take advantage of somebody else’s audience and redirect it back to your email list and eventually your value ladder. So even at lower follower counts, this can still be effective, but know that it will compound as your own audience grows (i.e. 3,000 follower account swapping with 3,000 follower account vs. 10,000 follower account swapping with 10,000 follower account).
It also only makes sense if the person you’re doing a collab with has a similar audience to you. Otherwise, you’re either going to drive low-quality traffic back to your value ladder or no traffic at all.
Aakash Gupta of Product Growth uses creator collabs extremely well, and it’s helped him grow an audience of over 300k and an email list of 105k.
Another cool part about creator collabs is that you get to build with other people! As a solopreneur and creator, it can get lonely sometimes. So something as simple as writing an article or producing a video with somebody else in your niche can be a nice change of pace. Being a Ladder Creator should be fun, so any time you can combine having a good time with getting results is a plus.
If you’re thinking about doing a creator collab, my best recommendation would be to just ask. I don’t love outbound sales because it’s SUPER low leverage, but doing outbound to land a creator collab can be a MUCH better use of your time.
From outbound sales, at MOST you’re going to close 1 person at a time. But from doing outbound for a creator collab, you might be able to drive 100+ people back to your ecosystem so you can start putting them up your value ladder.
It’s the same amount of work, but MUCH higher leverage. Those are the kinds of activities I like 🙂
5. Teaser Posts
This is one you can start implementing IMMEDIATELY to drive dozens of people back to your ecosystem every single week.
Leveraging authority is my favorite tactic for growing an audience, but teaser posts are my favorite way to extract that audience and bring them into your world.
The best thing about teaser posts is your content is the entire draw. People sign up to join your newsletter because of the value you’re providing. You don’t have to give them freebies or entice them in any other way. They are there to learn. It’s one of the best ways to get engaged readers on your list. And a more engaged list means more people will buy. And more people buying gets us one step closer to running our freedom businesses on autopilot.
If you haven’t noticed, I do this EVERY SINGLE WEEK for my newsletter. Heck, some of you reading this now might be here because of the teaser post I used yesterday (I know, kinda meta…hehehe). For my newsletter which goes out on Friday (a slight change for me), I will post a “teaser” or “sneak-peak” of what is going to come on Thursday across social platforms (which right now is only LinkedIn).
The key to a great teaser post is curiosity. They usually won’t do great in terms of impressions, but that’s fine. They’re part of our overall content strategy, which leverages a mix of growth, authority building, and extraction. Teaser posts fall into the last category. They are PURELY for extraction, so don’t worry if the reach isn’t great.
Spend a good amount of time crafting your teaser posts. If you do them well, they will drive more subscribers in one day than any other day of the week. Sometimes more than the entire week combined.
It’s like the headline for a landing page or the first 7 seconds of an advertisement. That’s where marketers spend 80-90% of their time because it’s what ends up driving the most sales. The more curiosity you can evoke in your teaser post, the more people will think “what the hell could this guy POSSIBLY be talking about??? I NEED to find out.” And then they not only come into your world by joining your newsletter, but they’re primed and ready to read it as well. And if you provide value in your newsletter (which you should be spending the majority of your time on as a Ladder Creator), that first experience will make them come back week after week to read it again.
Admittedly, I’m still getting better at teaser posts myself. In the beginning, I was giving too much away. I didn’t leave ANYTHING to the imagination, so nobody felt compelled to sign up for my newsletter to learn more. From the post, they already knew what the newsletter was about, so there was no reason for them to read the full thing.
Here’s a few examples from bad teaser posts I’ve done:
And now take a look at a decent one:
Do you see how much more curiosity I evoke in the third picture compared to the first two? I don’t blame people for not wanting to sign up after the first posts. I wouldn’t want to learn more either.
Now let’s take a look at an absolute teaser post PRO: Chenell Basilio. Teaser posts are what got me on to her newsletters. And they’re what get me PUMPED to read each edition every week.
As a side note, I only read about 5 newsletters on a weekly basis. And this is 1 of them, in large part because of how much she peaks my curiosity with her teaser posts.
Take a look at these 3 from Chenell:
As a creator interested in growing my newsletter, it’s hard for me to NOT want to learn more. And that’s exactly how she brought me into her ecosystem and keeps me coming back week after week
What Can You Start Implementing Today?
In reality, you can start using ALL of these today for better traffic to your value ladder. But at the VERY LEAST, start creating a social strategy that optimizes for getting people onto your email list so that you can move them up your value ladder.
For me, here’s what that looks like:
- 3x weekly deep dives for authority (1 of these is a recap from the previous week’s newsletter, so I don’t have to do any more research AND I can drive people back to my newsletter)
- 2x weekly stories/personal brand posts for relatability, likeability, and growth
- 1x weekly “teaser” post for extraction
I’m still figuring out the best way to balance all of these to simultaneously grow and extract people to my list, but I’ll be doing an entire letter on my own content strategy (as well as a mini-course!) in the future, so I will keep you updated.
I’m assuming that as I grow and establish more authority as “The Value Ladder Guy” I can start to lean more heavily into extraction and less on building authority (since it will already be built), but we will see how that unfolds over the next 6-12 months.
And that’s it for today!
I’ll see y’all next week. Hopefully a few more of you start newsletters so you can start getting people up your value ladders 😄!