Ascend 101

Lessons about building a one-person business, writing, and self-improvement

I have no doubts that you’ve put everything from last week into practice.

You’re fully aware of what content you need for growth, leads, and sales.

But there’s still one thing missing…

Traffic.

You could write the best thread anyone has ever written.

But it doesn’t matter if nobody sees it.

So how do you get eyes on your content when you don’t have a big following yet?

That’s our topic for today.

This is a 7-minute read.

Let’s go!

Getting eyes on your content

There are a lot of misconceptions about getting eyes on your content.

Especially when you don’t have a big audience yet.

Yesterday evening I was talking with 2 big accounts. I won’t reveal their identity. But I can tell you that one has 240k+ followers and the other has 450k+ followers.

You’d think they know a thing or two about Twitter. And don’t get me wrong, they do.

But not everything.

We were going over my account and they were giving feedback on my branding.

One of the critiques they gave me was about my offer. It didn’t make sense.

My bio at the time stated: “Cold outreach is overrated. I help creators make internet money while working less than 3 hours a day by leveraging warm traffic.”

They were confused as to how I was going to leverage the warm traffic of other people. The only way to get warm traffic is to build a huge audience they said. Who am I to convince people that I know how to do that?

I explained how you don’t need a huge audience to get warm traffic. Not for the right warm traffic at least.

The people I work with all have high-ticket offers. You only really need 2–5 clients a month to make more than the average US salary.

Anyone who has 200–300 Twitter followers can do this.

Now how do we get the right type of traffic?

That’s where we’ll utilize the power of the Dream 100

Dream 100

The Dream 100 was originally a sales strategy developed and popularized by Chet Holmes.

But that’s not the one we’re interested in. We’re interested in the adapted Dream 100 strategy popularised by Russell Brunson.

This strategy allows you to get your content in front of your ideal customers without having to build a big audience yourself.

This is how it works:

You start by identifying who your dream customers are. You then find out where they are congregating. Or in other words: who are they already following?

Make a list of ALL the (relatively) big accounts your dream customer might be following.

Imagine if you identified 156 accounts that your dream customers would follow. And suppose that each of those accounts has on average 20k followers — on the low end.

That’s over 3 million potential dream customers.

The trick now is that you don’t have to get in contact with all 3 million people. You can focus all of your efforts on those 156 accounts.

Sounds doable, right?

Engagement Cycle

We’ve got our list of big accounts. Great.

What now? How will this get us free traffic?

This is the fun part. We’ll start engaging with them.

This is a method that I call the Engagement Cycle.

1) Get to know them (Day 1–7)

The first 7 days are the easiest. Indulge in the content of your Dream 100.

Set a few minutes aside each day and consume their content.

Learn what they like to talk about. Pick up on their writing style. Get on their newsletter. Listen to their podcasts.

Get to know as much about them as you can.

You’ll be engaging with them in the following stages. And the worst mistake I see people make all the time is engaging someone without fully understanding what they do or why they do it.

2) Get them to know your face (Day 8–14)

After the first 7 days you have a good feel for who they are.

Now we’ll make them recognize you.

Start engaging with their posts. Comment on a tweet you thought was insightful.

Reply to a newsletter issue you thought was well written.

But keep it on the timeline for now.

This stage is to warm them up.

Your Dream 100 gets thousands of cold DMs a day. You want them to recognize your face before you send them a message.

3) Start talking (Day 15–30)

Now is the time when you send them a DM.

But don’t pitch them anything yet.

Pretend you’re trying to date them.

Start a friendly conversation. Be genuinely interested in them.

Give them a compliment and ask some questions.

Don’t start telling your story or tell them what you can do for them.

4) Provide value (Day 31–60)

At this point you’ve built a great relationship with some of your Dream 100.

You sadly can’t expect all of them to reciprocate the attention.

Now is the time to double down on giving. Provide as much value as you can.

Don’t ask them “How can I help you?” either.

Asking someone how you could help them is asking them to do the work for you.

It’s up to you to do your homework. Figure out what could be useful to them.

Do you have a product or a service they could benefit from?

Give it to them for free. No matter the cost. Just give it.

Help them out with any resources they need or help them connect with others that they could benefit from.

This opens up so many opportunities.

Wrap-up

The end goal of the Engagement Cycle is to befriend the people whose audience consists of your dream customers.

This allows for collaborations (courses, cohorts, podcasts, spaces, or just them sharing your content) where you can get directly in front of their audience.

This is the fastest way to get warm organic traffic from the exact people you want.

You’re leveraging the work someone else has done to build their audience.

The biggest upside?

Even if it doesn’t work like you hoped. You’re unable to land collaborations or befriend your Dream 100.

Remember stage 2 where you started commenting on their posts?

You’re already getting your content in front of their audience.

If your comments are high-quality their audience will be intrigued and start checking out your profile.

You’re profiting as soon as day 7. With an enormous upside of collaborating down the line if everything works out.

This is the single greatest strategy for getting eyes on your content.

Use it.

Next week

This time around I won’t forget to fill in this section!

We’ve talked about A LOT by now.

The past 5 weeks have been filled with value.

But there’s still a question that remains unanswered.

“How do you craft an offer so good that people feel stupid saying no?”

So next week we’ll dive deep into offer creation.

It’ll be jam-packed with value, just like this one.

You don’t want to miss that one.

See you next week!

Cheers,
Alex.

P.S.

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