Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS
In this episode of GradBlogger, we talk about understanding the value ladder for your business and blog. We also provide some practical examples of the value ladder in use and reveal the top four mistakes people make when starting and running an online business.
Disclosure: Some 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 #20 of GradBlogger, where we’re helping academics build online businesses and change the world. This is a show dedicated to helping you create side hustles, online businesses, and personal brands and influence the change that you want to see in the world. I’m your host, Dr. Chris Cloney. In today’s episode, we’re talking about understanding the value ladder for your business and blog.
Chris Cloney: 00:26
Why are we talking about a value ladder? What is the value ladder concept? What does providing value mean? What are the steps in the value ladder? We’re going to give a couple of examples.
We’re also going to give you an example of a good funnel, talk about what a funnel is, and discuss why I don’t like that terminology in this episode. We’ll talk about ladders as well, and I’ll give you an example from DustSafetyScience, which is the company that I’m building.
Chris Cloney: 00:48
We’ll close this episode out by talking about the four common mistakes that academic entrepreneurs make when using this value ladder concept to visualize their business and they’re important. So, stay tuned until the end of the episode, and we’ll present some information that I think will be transformative in how you think about your business.
Chris Cloney: 01:05
As always, you can get the transcripts for this episode at gradblogger.com/20. If you want the four stages of the value ladder outline and a one-page cheat sheet, you can get that there, as well.
Why the value ladder concept?
Chris Cloney: 01:15
So, why are we talking about a value ladder? What is this all about?
It comes back to me doing some soul searching for GradBlogger. I want to be very transparent as I build GradBlogger and my independent research company. I also want to understand where other people get stuck. I talk to a lot of academics who do business coaching, and I’m starting to see there’s a lot of similarities and a lot of trends.
Chris Cloney: 01:42
There’s also a lot of bad information out there. If you Google ‘online marketing’ or ‘digital marketing,’ you can go down the rabbit hole, especially when things like funnels and different information come up.
I want to dispel some of the myths. I’m going to share my experience of running a business over the last three years. It’ll help you with the problems you’re having and see where you’re getting stuck.
Chris Cloney: 02:03
This concept of the value ladder keeps coming back, and I want to explain it in this episode.
What is the ladder and what does providing value mean? You hear this term tossed around a lot. If you’ve been in digital marketing or online business for any period of time, I’m sure you’ve heard of this. I want to provide value, I have to provide value, I’m going to provide value, I provide value. What does that mean?
What does “providing value” mean?
Chris Cloney: 02:29
A general definition is being useful. Providing value equates being useful and providing useful information to the world. The problem is that in a world of overload, being very useful isn’t good enough.
It’s not good enough to stand out. It’s not good enough to build a business. It’s not good enough to get people to change their attitudes and their minds about some of the important things that are going on in the world, things that we need academics, scientists, and researchers like ourselves to weigh in on. Being useful isn’t the bar that we want to hit. Providing value isn’t far enough, in my opinion. That’s why I get into this value ladder concept.
Chris Cloney: 03:05
I want you to build an online business that can change the world. I want you to do better and be better than what’s out there today, and you’re going to have to go against some of the common wisdom that you hear online about this sort of thing. That’s why, at the end of this episode, we’re going to talk about these four common mistakes that I see come up time and time again as I talk to academic entrepreneurs trying to build their own business.
What is the value ladder?
Chris Cloney: 03:26
So, what is the value ladder? You can think of it as moving from lower value information or content to producing or providing higher value results. if you are in the online marketing space long enough, you may hear this process called a funnel. You may also hear words like tripwires and low value offers, and even customer ascension, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about going from lower-value information to higher-value results.
I don’t like the word funnel when it’s applied to people. It’s all right to apply the word funnel to numbers. It’s like a leaky funnel you’re pouring sand into: if you have holes, you have a 20% conversion here and 10% here. That makes sense, but when you apply funnels to a person, you’re saying you tricked them into falling into this funnel-shaped thing, and now they climb the walls and can’t get out, and we’re trying to get them to buy some high-priced offer at the end. That doesn’t jive with the way I want to build a business, and I suspect that GradBlogger listeners feel the same.
Chris Cloney: 04:31
What is the value ladder? The four stages for the value ladder are:
- Creating information
- Providing value
- Teaching solutions
- Getting results
We’re going to go through each of these stages in sequence, and then we’ll go through a couple examples, as well.
Stage 1: Creating Information
Chris Cloney: 04:52
Stage one is creating information. This is where we all get started with blogging. You’re doing random topic blogging, which we talked about in previous episodes of the podcast. You’re creating information and putting it out there in the world without a lot of rhyme or reason. You’re blogging about your experience, but you’re missing the framing part that makes it useful for your reader.
This is an important step, however, because the biggest thing you need to learn how to do as a blogger and business owner, is create content and ship it into the world. It’s a muscle. It needs to be exercised. It’s an important step in your journey. So if you’re there today, if you’re creating information, don’t be discouraged. Know that’s where you start, but know that you’re going to need to keep climbing up the ladder to build a successful business that can change the world. So that’s step one: creating information.
Stage 2: Providing Value
Chris Cloney: 05:36
Step two is where you provide value. A lot of people get to this stage. Now you’re curating and orchestrating material so that it’s useful to the audience. You’re providing entry-level material for people getting started. You’re providing intermediate and more advanced material, and you’re starting to outline different topics and segments that can help different people, and presenting that information in a more useful way. Now you’re providing value by giving people information they can use.
Chris Cloney: 06:06
The Content Machine Series covers a lot of this: Episode #8 on random topic blogging and Episode #11 on three-minute papers. These are all good examples of content machines that can help you start providing more value into the world.
Stage 3: Teaching Solutions
Chris Cloney: 06:19
Stage three of the value ladder is teaching solutions. Now we’ve gone beyond providing information that’s timely, orchestrated, and curated to provide value to the reader, Now we’re giving them solutions. We’re giving them frameworks. We’re giving them strategies to help them move ahead in their life and create more useful material, like courses, webinars, and other higher-impact solutions.
The biggest struggle here is that there are so many of them being created. We covered this issue in Episode# 14 with Dr. Gaius Augustus, when we talked about growing a brand and freelancing. We also talked about the difference between a course and a workshop, and how we used a workshop to expedite and speed up his business-building process.
Chris Cloney: 07:02
The problem with all these e-courses is that there are a ton of them out there, and it creates confusion because it’s hard to tell what’s good and what’s not good. There’s not usually a mechanism to ensure success and to follow up. I don’t know how many of you have bought a course and not finished it. There are probably three courses that I’ve bought and been unable to get through, due to time limitations. That’s the nature of this field.
Teaching these solutions is a great next step. It’s better than providing value, but there may still be some issues with following up with the people who take the courses and getting them results.
Stage 4: Getting Results
Chris Cloney: 07:46
Getting results is the fourth and final step of the value ladder. You’re helping your customers set goals, be accountable, and achieve results that can change their life and the impact they can make in the world. They’re no longer buying a course and letting it sit on the shelf. They’re out there taking action and using their research and experience to build their online business or whatever it is that they’re trying to do with your guidance.
Chris Cloney: 08:17
In a previous podcast episode, I mentioned that my personal goal for GradBlogger is to help 1,000 academics each help 1,000 people. This is how I’m going to make a change for a million people in the world.
One of the ways that I will do this is through this coaching: helping people individually, holding hands, setting goals, and being with them along their entire journey. I share the knowledge that I’ve gained through the last three years spent building my own independent research company, participating in communities, consuming material and using it to build a great online business.
Chris Cloney: 08:57
So those are the four stages of the value ladder for your business and your blog: creating information, providing value, teaching solutions, and getting results. if you want to create a large and effective change in the world through your online business, this is a great process and a great framework for thinking about how to build that business.
Chris Cloney: 09:16
I want to give two examples of the value ladder concept. One’s an example of a funnel, but I want to use it as an example of a useful funnel, one where we’re not talking about things like tripwires, conversion tools and other elements that, in my opinion, shouldn’t be applied to people. Again, funnels should apply to numbers. They shouldn’t apply to people. People shouldn’t be trapped and unable to escape what we’re sending them through.
Example #1: Running a Brick and Mortar Gym (Funnel)
Chris Cloney: 09:41
Example number one is running a brick and mortar gym.This is an example of an offline funnel that shows the four steps of the value ladder. In this case, the way of providing information could be social media material promoting the gym, its story, yourself as the owner. You’re putting that information in the world and using it to drive interest in that gym.
Then you can provide free meal plans, simple at-home workouts, and things that get people started. Now you’ve moved from creating information to providing value in people’s lives. I’ve used free at-home workouts from gyms in my local area, and they provide a lot of value in my life.
Chris Cloney: 10:19
Then you reach stage four, which involves teaching solutions. Maybe you have a large classroom-style workout, and you’re getting people in and teaching them different forms and how to do different types of workouts. Step four would be your one-on-one training.
This is where a lot of small gyms make the most of their money. They have these other parts: they create information, they provide value, they teach solutions, but a lot of small gyms make most of their money giving individual clients a specific result: lose X amount of weight or put on X amount of muscle. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with a coach, but you can get exceptionally higher results than you can in any of the other three stages of the value ladder.
Chris Cloney: 11:02
That’s example number one. In my opinion, this is a funnel because social media leads people through to the free meal plans and large classrooms and then the coaching. Now that I think about it, maybe that is a ladder. It’s either a good funnel or a ladder, but it’s not an example of a bad funnel. You’re not tricking anyone into going to the gym. You’re providing them value along the way. Again, there are no tripwires or other icky things that you see in a lot of online business marketing funnels.
Example #2: DustSafetyScience (Value Ladder)
Chris Cloney: 11:34
I derive example number two from my online research company at dustsafetyscience.com. Again, we have the same four stages: creating information, providing value, teaching solutions and getting results.
For myself, this is distilling the whole journey that I’ve had since 2016 when I started blogging online in that space. That business is around industrial safety, specifically avoiding fire and explosion hazards in industries handling powdered and solid materials. That was the topic of my Ph.D. research.
Chris Cloney: 12:04
Stage one for me was becoming the best and most relevant source in the world for this type of information, which was the science of explosions. I was also looking into incidents and figuring out why they were happening. I started a blog and wrote for almost a year before I started a business from it.
Chris Cloney: 12:24
Stage two is providing value: going from creating new information to curating and putting together great content for people throughout the world. For me, this was launching a worldwide initiative to track incidents and create lessons learned from fires and explosions. Every week at DustSafetyScience, we track 10 to 15 cases of industrial safety incidents happening around the world. We try to put them together, find commonalities, and figure out why they’re happening. We provide this information to the research community and to the industry, so it’s a value-add.
Chris Cloney: 13:00
Stage four is teaching solutions, which for me is in-person presentations and training sessions. We will do online courses and that sort of thing for industrial safety in the future, but I want to emphasize in-person stuff because I want to tune up my ability in that space and test the format out. It’s a format that’s more commonly known in industrial circles: people go in and do training. So that’s how I go about teaching solutions.
Chris Cloney: 13:26
As for the final step, getting results, this consists of tracking our progress over time. I will give a couple examples of real-life and big results that we’ve obtained.
We connected government officials in other countries with people who they needed to talk to. We did this for Jordan, where they needed research on how to do proper demolition of grain silos. After some unfortunate things that happened in their grain handling facilities, they were able to come up with a strategy and a process to better demolish these types of plants.
Chris Cloney: 14:07
We also helped facilities in Brazil, Africa, the UK, India, and across North America connect with local experts to make their facilities safer. I know, because the people report back to me and say, “Because of this piece of content, we were able to connect,” or, “Because of the industrial membership that we have as part of DustSafetyScience, we’re able to find these service providers.” We also have created many research partnerships between government groups, universities, and research institutions. This is all part of our large goal, which is having a year with zero fatalities from these types of accidents over the next 20-year period.
Chris Cloney: 14:43
The reason I bring all this up is that I could’ve stopped at providing information. I could’ve blogged. I could’ve only wrote blog posts and left it there. Maybe I stopped at providing value or kept providing value but maybe I didn’t do any teaching of solutions. Maybe I never thought to go any farther about getting results: real wins for people in the real world.
Chris Cloney: 15:05
I could’ve stopped there, and a lot of people do get hung up when they’re creating a blog and they don’t take it to those next steps in the value ladder, so that’s why I wanted to share it. Because you can, as an academic, as an expert, make big changes in the world if you focus on these higher-level stages: teaching solutions and getting results for people out there in the world.
Four common mistakes related to your online business
Chris Cloney: 15:23
I want to close off this episode by talking about four common mistakes that I see academics making in their online businesses.
Mistake #1: Creating a business focused only on “providing value”
Mistake number one is creating or trying to create a business-focused only on the ‘providing value’ step. A great example is all these websites that only sell $10 e-books. Well, a $10 e-book is great and it can provide value, but they probably don’t contain enough information to teach real solutions or even get a result.
The difficulty from a business standpoint is that it requires an extremely high volume to make a functioning business out of $10 e-books. If you wanted to have $100,000 book, you’d need to sell 10,000 units a year. You’d need a lot of volume coming through your website to be able to do that.
Chris Cloney: 16:14
For every success story in this space (and there are people who have created a great business from $10 ebooks), there are thousands of failures that you don’t hear about. History is written by the victors, as they say. For every success story, there are many, many, many people who failed because they didn’t have a business model that moved from providing value into these other areas.
Chris Cloney: 16:32
This is a great place to start. Providing value is important, but it’s best to see this as a marketing channel, not your business. It’s how you bring people to your website and, dare I say, even generate leads, although maybe we’re getting into this funnel terminology that I was warning about at the start.
Providing value is how you become recognized as a personal brand. Your online business is built after that. It’s not built from that. So that’s mistake number one for academics in entrepreneurship: Creating a business focused solely on providing value and not moving on to teaching solutions or getting results.
Mistake #2: Trying to “Get Results” for everyone
Chris Cloney: 17:10
Mistake number two is on the other end of the spectrum: trying to get results for everyone. For me, it was a huge realization that only a small segment of my audience is ready to turn their business into a world-changing business.
Anybody can get there, but not everybody’s there today. Maybe they don’t even have a website up yet. Maybe they have some mental blocks that are stopping them from moving forward and creating and shipping content. If I focus all of my efforts on getting results for these people, it would be very draining and it’d be very hard to do. That’s why we have this podcast. It’s a way to get through some of these earlier steps and bring people up to a place where they can start to make meaningful change in the world.
Chris Cloney: 17:56
One quote that I’ve said on the podcast a couple times is that 10% of your existing customers or your existing audience would probably pay you 10 to 100 times more than they are right now to get a specific result. But that’s only 10%. If you take that mindset with the other 90%, you’re going to be in for a hard ride.
Chris Cloney: 18:11
I’ve seen some academics make this mistake, where they have some early success, and then they try to go and get these results for everyone and don’t realize that this ladder is meant for getting people more educated and more qualified. We’ll talk about what that means in a second.
Mistake #3: Building the ladder before understanding your strengths
Chris Cloney: 18:28
Mistake number three is building the ladder before you understand your unique strengths. You may have this amazing funnel with a tripwire, with a cheap product, a more expensive bundle, membership, or course, and some backend, high-end product. That’s your traditional marketing funnel. But if you don’t understand your unique strengths, you’re going to lead people to the wrong place.
Once they get to the bottom of the funnel, they’re going to end up in a place where you can’t help them. You end up with this hollow business that’s not even built on a strong foundation. It’s not built on your unique strengths and the unique things that you can put into the world.
Chris Cloney: 19:05
As part of my soul searching exercise, I identified my unique strength as being that I’ve done it. I’ve created an online business in my Ph.D. research area. I spent a significant amount of time learning and synthesizing information from hundreds and hundreds of podcast hours a year, and lots of books and that sort of stuff. That’s how I get the fodder for these podcast episodes.
Then I generate the connections through helping academics build their online business. I’ve tested this. I’ve done the accelerated program, I’ve done other programs and other coffee chats that help people get results in their online business. I know those are my strengths and I’m building the ladder in my business towards those strengths.
Chris Cloney: 19:51
It wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense for me to build a business that shows people how to do sales at a car dealership or something similar, because that’s not my strength. Sure, I might be able to dream up this fancy process that could get people there, but at the end of the day, if they’re not going toward my unique strength, then we’re going to have a business that doesn’t work.
Mistake #4: Building the ladder before understanding your customer
Chris Cloney: 20:07
The fourth and final mistake is pretty similar to mistake number three, and that’s building the ladder before you understand your customer. You don’t want to build a ladder leading to somewhere that’s not your strength. You also don’t want to build a ladder that’s inappropriate for the people who you’re trying to help.
This first step -understanding the person who’s coming to your website- is critically important. You do it by getting insights about them. We’ll talk about building customer insight machines in future episodes. This consists of talking to them, sitting down, having coffee chats. If you ever were where your customer is now, you’ll have a good understanding of what your customer’s going through: their feelings, the problems they’re having, the needs that they have, and the needs that they don’t know they have.
Chris Cloney: 20:53
These are things that we’ll cover a lot more as the podcast continues, but I wanted to highlight that as another mistake. You need to know your customer before you start building this value ladder concept. This means understanding what information to create, what value to put into the world, how to teach solutions, and how to get results.
Chris Cloney: 21:10
So those are the four mistakes, then:
- Creating a business focused solely on providing value
- Trying to get results for everyone
- Building the ladder before you understand your strengths
- Building a ladder before understanding your customer
Conclusion
Chris Cloney: 21:41
So that’s it for this episode on understanding the value ladder for your business and your blog. I hope it’s been helpful. We talked about:
- What providing value means
- The different stages of the value ladder, from creating information to providing value, teaching solutions, and getting results.
We’ve talked about four mistakes that academics traditionally make in this space:
- Creating a business that focuses only on providing value
- Trying to get results for everyone
- Creating the ladder before you understand your strengths
- Creating the ladder before you understand the strengths of the people whom you’re trying to build a business around and for
Chris Cloney: 22:17
So that’s it for this episode. As always, you can find the transcripts on gradblogger.com/20. We will put out a cheat sheet with the four stages highlighted and the different steps that we mentioned.
Chris Cloney: 22:38
If you liked this episode and you like the content we’re creating at GradBlogger, give me a shout out on social media. Tag me on Instagram, tag me on Twitter @gradblogger. Let me know what you think. Let me know if you’re struggling to figure out how to design your business and increase the impact it can have on the world.
Chris Cloney: 22:55
If you’re interested in any of these coaching sessions or offers we’re putting out about the accelerator programs, you can learn more at gradblogger.com/coaching. As always, I appreciate you listening to the GradBlogger podcast. I’m really excited to keep building more material and increasing the impact that we, as academics, as researchers, as people who are certified experts, can make as we go about making a change in the world.
I am excited to have you along for that journey, so have a great week ahead. I look forward to the next podcast.
Resources
Previous Podcasts:
GBP014: How to grow a brand and generate freelance income with Dr. Gaius Augustus (Accelerator Program Case Study)
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)
