Run a Challenge and Build Your List!
Is your ideal community driven to reach a measurable goal, such as losing weight before summer, publishing a Kindle book or landing their first client?
If your answer is “yes”, running a time-limited challenge may be the best kick-starting strategy for you to build your list.
Challenges are wonderful because they tend to attract people ready to break past long-term obstacles and take action. Once you understand the psychology of this, you have a captive audience that is not only eager but motivated to succeed.
Make sure that your Challenge benefits and advances your ideal member in a transformative way.
For example:
- Helps your challenge member achieve a specific goal or fulfill a dream
- Empowers your challenge member with the confidence and/or skills to finally take the next step
- Provides her with a knowledgeable community offering support and encouragement
- Provides her with validation—from other members, as well as from you
- Allows you to share in—and celebrate—her success
Challenges are exciting. They make people feel “in the moment” and alive. Members of your Challenge are drawn together by a common bond and goal—and they all look to you for guidance.
Reasons to use it:
For your own benefit, there is no more powerful testimony than from a person you have directly helped to succeed in attaining a measurable goal or result. As with a Facebook Group, you will also receive priceless feedback in the form of questions, praises and comments.
You will be able to gauge:
- What really excites your typical member
- What she still struggles with
- What major obstacles she finds hard to overcome
- What she finds easy
- What she still needs
- What she desperately wants next
And, of course, you are interactively engaged—with multiple members and potential clients at once.
How to Use it:
Setting up a Challenge can be done in several ways such as via a Facebook Group, through a membership site—whatever works best for you and your ideal audience.
You can set up instant or mini-challenges in contest form. You can use challenges within challenges to keep your members fired up and moving forward: For example, while you are running your Sixty-Day-Finish-your-Novel Challenge, throw in weekly mini-challenges with prizes, such as “Best Title”; or if your paid Challenge includes a deal on software such as eCover Authority, “Best eCover Design”.
Mini-challenges give people small, attainable goals—and there’s no shame in deciding not to participate in optional mini-challenges. They also boost confidence and keep excitement levels high—and let’s not forget that large successes are often built on smaller successes.
That being said, make very sure any Challenge you create is neither too easy nor too hard. It should feel like a “challenge”—but inspire your participant with the feeling that they can do it!
You can also create a free mini-version of your challenge to inspire people, give them a taste of what you’re offering and create momentum.
Create milestones, check-in points and those mini-challenges—and decide in advance if people will be permanently eligible for the next time you run the Challenge; if they can put your Challenge “on hold” if some life event throws a wrench in the works, or if they have to pay full (or partial) price to start again.
Challenges create focus for you, as well as for your members. They help you fast-track your members—and your reputation-building and visibility too.
Challenges create a core community of loyal, engaged followers and subscribers.