Find New Clients With A 5-Day Challenge

Running an online challenge can help you gain credibility, find new clients, and grow your community. But, if you’re new to online challenges, it can be intimidating to jump right in.

If that sounds like you, you might have a ton of questions such as:

How long should my challenge be?
How do I promote my challenge?
Where do I even begin?

In this edition of Better Business Conversations, Michelle Leotta, Health Coach and Business Mentor, answers these questions (the unanswered questions standing in the way of your challenge launch) and sets you up for success!

Why 5 Days Sells Health and Wellness Courses

Michelle shares that you can maximize attention in just five days compared to having interest drop off in a 30-day challenge. After the end of five days, your audience will be engaged and excited for more from you! If your goal is to sell an online course, you’ll have more clients excited to make that purchase after having established trust and credibility during the online challenge.

How to Create an Online Challenge

Step 1? Establish your goal. Michelle encourages you to begin by determining how you want to measure the success of your challenge.

What We Covered:

The many ways your business can benefit from running this type of virtual event
How to decide on a topic, create an outline for your challenge, and create all the necessary materials
Why challenges are so helpful in gaining credibility with your audience
Effective promotion ideas, including an example opt-in page from one of Michelle’s 5-day challenges

Implement Michelle’s Strategies in Practice Better

Creating Your 5-Day Challenge

Michelle shares that a five-day challenge doesn’t need to be any more than a series of five emails. Practice Better makes it simple to launch your next online wellness challenge by creating an Email-only Course! You can customize your subject, title, content, and schedule your emails from one platform.

Promoting Your Challenge to Existing Clients

If you have engaged clients that you want to invite to your online challenge, you can easily send them a message with an invite to register! Generate some buzz and urgency around your challenge by implementing a client limit and registration deadline. If your challenge includes a group component, share that this is a great chance to connect with like-minded people going through similar health journeys.

Customizing Your Booking Page

Customize your five-day challenge booking page and share your personalized link for people to sign up! It’s simple to embed your Practice Better booking widget into your landing page or website. If you don’t have a website and landing pages set up just yet, share your booking link instead! For example, you can share your link in your broadcast message or on social media.

Better Business Conversations with Michelle Leotta

Each month, our Business Success Coaches host a lively discussion with experts in our community, bringing top business-building practices to health & wellness entrepreneurs. Take a moment to watch the session with Michelle below.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to get notified about new business growth content as it goes live.

About Michelle

Michelle Leotta has been featured on ABC, CBS, NPR, and in the movie “Lemonade” with her inspiring story of burnout recovery. She has spent the past 13 years as a practicing, certified health coach and a mentor for health coaches, a presenter at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and host of the Health Coach Power Community podcast and Facebook group.

Connect with Michelle: Website | Instagram

Join Michelle’s 5 Day Challenge: HealthCoachPower.com/bootcamp

Download Michelle’s slideshow presentation.

Webinar Transcript:

Brittany:
Hi everyone. Welcome to Better Business Essentials. This is a series by Practice Better where we partner with industry experts to share their knowledge and expertise with our community of health and wellness professionals. You might recognize our guest today. This is the third Better Business Session that she has done, and in fact was our very first. She’s a seasoned vet at this. Now, for those of you who don’t know Michelle, she has been a health coach for the past 13 years and also acts as a mentor for health coaches. She’s a presenter at the Institute of Integrative Nutrition and the host of the Health Coach Power Community Podcast and Facebook group. So welcome, Michelle. We are so excited to have you back for round three.

Michelle:
Hey, thanks for having me back. Look, I even wore Practice Better green for you.

Brittany:
That’s amazing. I’m really excited to dive into our topic today and introduce it to you guys. I think the potential of what Michelle is going to share is huge for our community. This stuff can really transform your business. Michelle is going to walk us through all about online challenges as a way to gain credibility with your audience and fill up this funnel of prospective clients with your community. She’s going to share lots of insight and considerations for how you can run your own challenge and how you can do it well. With that said, I’m going to hand it over to Michelle. She’s going to dive in and take us through today’s session.

Michelle:
All right, we have so much to cover. Hello everybody. You know what? In my 13-year career as a health coach, I’m a graduate from [inaudible], a graduate of a Viva Roms Professional Training Program, and I work entirely online. All these years I’ve leaned very heavily on two main types of virtual promotional events. The first are free webinars and the other are free five-day challenges. I find that the challenges are incredible for creating engagement with your community, allowing you and your audience to really get to know each other. I’ve also helped hundreds, maybe thousands of practitioners in my health coach power community Facebook group to run their first five-day challenges because I think it is the perfect way to jump in, start working with people, share your message, and have a lot of fun along the way and sign clients.

Why a 5-Day Challenge is Appealing

Michelle:
It’s just an all in one. You need to hit the ground running with your business. I don’t think there’s any better way to do it. Do you ever wonder why we do five days? It’s always a five-day challenge. Why not the eight day challenge or the 27 day challenge? I’m going to tell you, people get excited and they want to participate, but if you offer a free 30 days or even a free 14 days, it’s going to be like crickets at the end. I can pretty much guarantee you that. So I have found that shorter is better. Everyone’s attention span can last five days, and then everybody leaves on a high note wanting more. You know what I mean? As opposed to interest petering out or they forget about it or life happens, da, da, da, da, and they leave on that note instead.

Establish How You’re Going to Measure Your Success

Michelle:
We don’t want that. We want them to be excited. We want them to want more from what you have to offer. Here is something interesting. You never know how successful a five day challenge is when you’re watching other people do one. If you’ve signed up for somebody else’s five-day challenge, you might think it was very successful, but I’m here to tell you, you cannot tell from the outside. Sometimes even from the inside, you don’t even know if your own was successful. Here’s why. Maybe you were hoping to sign clients and you don’t end up signing any clients, but there are all these other measures of success. That’s the first thing that I want to talk about, why you’re going to run a five-day challenge and how you are going to measure success for yourself or in other words, what’s the business goal behind such an event?

Michelle:
This is what you have to decide first. So is your main goal. I have a couple slides, not too many slides for you guys today, but I do have a couple of slides. Let me pop that up on this screen here. Is your main goal to sell something then yes, you would measure success by how many sales are made or how much revenue is earned is your main goal to build your mailing list then it actually doesn’t matter if you sign any clients or if you make any money, you’re going to measure success based on how many people sign up for the challenge. Are you with me? Is your main goal to test a new idea or direction for your business or to re-engage with an audience who hasn’t heard from you in a while? That happens sometimes, right? You would know it worked.

Michelle:
You would know you were successful if they sign up, they’re opening your emails, they’re clicking on your links, they’re showing up to your lives all during those five days and they’re engaging with you. All different ways to measure success. Another important distinction that you’re going to want to make for yourself is this. Will your challenge run on specific dates in real time or will it be evergreen? Meaning does somebody have to sign up right now in order to participate during the set days and times of the challenge, or can they sign up any time? Because this challenge is automated? Both are totally valid options.

Try to Run Your First Challenge Live

Michelle:
I will say before you try to turn your five-day challenge into an evergreen offering, it’s very, very smart to run it live at least once, maybe twice, even three times to make sure it’s working as intended. You’re hitting those sales goals, you’re getting those new names on your mailing list, again, based on your measure of success, because let’s say that nobody signs up or nobody buys your thing when you’re running the challenge live, you can be quite sure that it’s not going to do any better when it’s evergreen.

Michelle:
Live is always going to perform better. You want to test it and know that it works. Well when you do it live, do that first and then later you can automate it and hopefully it will still work for you. For the sake of today, we’re going to use the example of a scenario where you’re using a live set date, five-day challenge with the primary goal of selling an online course. Now, before we start getting into all the goods, there’s one more aspect of strategy, and I promise this is going to make or break you. You really want to pay attention here. This is deciding who you’re targeting. Let’s go back to the slides for this one because my goodness, this is… I’m telling you, this is the make-it-or-break-it right here.

Decide Who On Your Target Audience

Michelle:
We want to figure out who we’re targeting, what is going to speak to this person? What is something that you can offer in five days that they want to do? They want to learn, they want to complete something that they want to create. What can you do with them in five days that they’re actually going to want? We have this person in mind. Of course, we can’t solve all their health problems in five days. That’s not what this is about. We shouldn’t try to solve somebody’s health problems in five days. This is not the five days. Let me tell you everything I know about all things related to health challenges. You will overwhelm them, you will overwhelm yourself with that approach and don’t do that. Instead, let’s pretend that you’re going to help women in their 40s who have endometriosis and you help them reduce and manage their symptoms.

Decide What You Want to Teach Your Audience

Michelle:
The challenge is going to be the challenge for you. The challenge about the challenge, let’s say the question about your challenge becomes, what can I teach her? What can I help her understand in these five days so that it becomes exceedingly obvious that there’s a gap between where she is now and where she wants to be? I want you to hear that again, we are not trying to fix the problem in five days. It’s impossible. But also, if we could fix somebody’s problem in five days, why would they ever pay us? That would be a terrible marketing idea. In this case, we want them to buy the online course, right? That’s going to help solve their problem. We want to get them to the place where they’re like, “Ah, I need that.” So once you have a strong strategy in place and you figure out who you’re targeting, here’s what happens next.

Get Started Creating Materials

Michelle:
You got to start creating the materials, and this is going to be pretty easy. There’s not a lot of technology required. Oh my God, right? That’s so good. A five day challenge does not need to be anything more than a series of five emails at its heart. That’s really all it is. You communicate with your group once over five days every day. You can keep your challenge really bare bones and minimal like that or you can add in all kinds of fun extras and we’re going to talk about those. I’m going to go through the elements in order from the absolute must-haves to the optional extras. First thing, as we discussed, you have to decide who you’re targeting and you need a topic for your five-day challenge. From there, you will create an outline. Think, “What’s going to happen on each of the dates?” “What are my participants going to learn?” Or “What am I going to ask them to do on each of those days?” You have two options.

Choose Between 2 Models of 5-Day Challenges

Michelle:
All five day challenges seem to boil down to one of these two models, if you will. So option one is you can have one topic that you go deep with exploring that topic a little bit more every day of your five days or working on the same thing for five days together. In that endometriosis example, maybe it’s going to be five days of dairy free living and each day there’ll be like a different recipe or maybe you focus on a different meal each day. Maybe you highlight a different dairy free product and you discuss that each day. But every single day is going to be about living dairy free for these women who have endometriosis. That’s option one going deep. Option two, you go wide, and this is where each day of your challenge covers something different. With, again, endometriosis maybe day one is going to be about nutrition topics, and day two is going to be about mindfulness, and day three is going to be about movement and so on and so forth.

Michelle:
Regardless, each day, whether you go deep or you go wide each day, you want to ask your participants to do something. So you don’t just want to tell them something and have them go, “Okay, that was boring.” No, we want to get them in action, right. Some sort of task or like a mini challenge, some action to take each day. This is going to help them solidify their understanding and get them in motion because ultimately we want them to buy your online course at the end, right. So we want them to take action and do things along the way. So we have a topic and an outline, those come first.

Which Elements to Add to Your Landing Page

Michelle:
The next very important non-negotiable thing that you need for your challenge is a landing page where people can sign up. Let’s look at an opt-in page. I created this for a five day challenge in my own health coaching business. We’ll just look at it as an example and talk about what needs to be on a page like this.

A Great Image

Michelle:
First you need a big old photo, preferably something that makes your target market feel inspired or maybe it’s aspirational or it’s something that they can identify with, whatever. This is a great, your photography is a great way to target your target. Even if you read none of the words on the screen right now, you just see the photo. You’re pretty sure this is not an event for men, right? That’s a very basic way of putting it. But your photography is one important way of making sure that you’re appealing to the right audience.

A Killer Headline

Michelle:
Then you need a killer headline. A good rule of thumb here is to ask yourself, what does your target market want? Just in very plain terms, right? Don’t start getting all clever, cutesy and using alliteration and stuff like, you don’t have to do that with headlines.Just think what do they want? Then that oftentimes can become your headline. This way your headline is communicating the value of what they’re signing up for. What I’m trying to say is don’t call it sign up for the five day challenge, because that inherently has no value at all. You want to speak to their pain point or speak to the success that they’re looking for. Speak to what they want.

Credentials and Challenge Summary

Michelle:
Also, on this page, it’s helpful if you have just a one-liner about who you are. Mention your most impressive credentials, of course, but you want to keep it brief. This is not an about page, It doesn’t even need to be a paragraph, it’s just a one liner. But be sure to mention who the heck you are. Then of course you’re going to want to have a quick summary about what the challenge entails and the dates that it is running.

Challenge Dates and Social Proof

Michelle:
You’d be very surprised actually, how often coaches, all practitioners, forget to put dates on a page like this. It’s so obvious to you, but it’s not obvious to the person who arrives on the page. You want to highlight these things, okay now, if you have appeared in any publications, if you have been on TV, like this is a great place to highlight where you’ve been seen for credibility or it’s called social proof. Another form of social proof you could have on your opt-in page like this would be testimonials. So if you have feedback from your audience about your challenge because you’ve held it before, you could use testimonials on this page. You might even use a client testimonial that’s more about you or the challenge topic, even if it’s not referring to the challenge itself, you could use that on this page as well.

Add Your Sign-Up Button

Michelle:
And then finally, there’s got to be a big old button on the page to sign up or some field where I can enter my first name, email address, and you want that call to action area, but in the field, you want it high on the page. Don’t make me scroll, scroll, scroll down the page to find it. Somebody goes through the process, they sign up, they’re going to get a thank you page and a confirmation email. That is the process.

Crafting Day 1-5 Challenge Emails

Michelle:
All right, Now let’s talk about those daily emails. I got this spelled out for you too. Let me just pop my other screen over. We’re going back and forth between screens today like crazy. If I sign up for your challenge, I got the thank you page, I got the confirmation email, then maybe a couple of days pass or a week passes or whatever because the challenge hasn’t started yet, and now I’m going to start receiving the daily emails.

Michelle:
One for every day of the challenge. That’s the very least, the minimum amount of communication that you’re going to have with your group. You’re going to have to write these emails. There is no right or wrong way to do it, so don’t go looking for a template, you can do this, You’re not going to mess it up. But I do want you to know that all your emails should include these elements.

Necessary Elements of Each Email

Lesson Topic

Michelle:
So you would have some lesson or topic or teaching of the day, whatever it is, it’s not a book, okay? It’s like a paragraph or two paragraphs. That’s it.

Mini Challenge or Task

Michelle:
Then you’re going to have a mini challenge or a task for the day that’s going to again solidify what you’re teaching and help them put it into action.

Optional: A link To Interact

Michelle:
Then optionally a link to interact, and this would typically go to that day’s Facebook group post.

Michelle:
We’ll talk more about that.

Optional: Link to Archive Page

Michelle:
You can also have a link to an archive page. I think this is the best thing ever. I always have an archive page just in case somebody misses an email, and I promise you somebody will miss an email or two or three or four, and if you try to resend out emails constantly, you will spend all day doing that. Instead, have an archive page that everybody can go to. It is there where they can catch up on anything that they missed.

Optional: Link to an Offer

Michelle:
Then because we’re going to be selling this online course at the end of days three, four, and five, that’s where I would start offering the online course and provide a link. Then you’re going to write the emails.

Schedule Your Emails

Michelle:
You’re going to schedule them in your email service provider. It doesn’t have to be fancy. They’re not an automation. It’s not like anything crazy, it’s just five emails. You got this. I know you can do this. Schedule them one per day at the same time of day. And if that’s all you do, you have successfully created your challenge, all right that’s it we’re done here. Just kidding, I got a lot more for you. But really that’s the basics. When you’re working with somebody for five days like this, they’re going to get a sense of your style and your approach and who you are, and they’re going to get all this great value from you. They’re going to know you better, they’re going to trust you. They’re going to be more likely to buy the thing you’re selling, in this case, your online course, which you’re going to offer towards the end. So those emails, that’s the meat and potatoes, right? Even if you’re a vegan, that’s the meat and potatoes right there.

The Benefit of Having a Group Component

Michelle:
The materials that you need to create, and we all know it is so much more effective when we actually interact with our audience. That is why it is very common to have a Facebook group or some type of group component, group chat component. It adds another layer of support. So the point of having a group is to direct your participants to interact with you and with each other, which is awesome. There’s like this group energy that takes over regarding each day’s topic, and it’s this built-in accountability piece. So I might ask my challenge participants to drink a glass of lemon water every morning, or maybe on day one. That’s what I want them to do. Drink a glass of lemon water. That’s that day’s task, and I could tell them to hop over to the group and check in and tell us that they accomplished it.

Or maybe I say, “Head over to the group and post a picture of your glass of lemon water.” Along with that, what’s going to happen is you’re going to start to get questions. How much lemon? Should the water be cold or warm? This is an opportunity for conversation and building a rapport with your challenge participants. So we want that. We want to encourage a lot of engagement in the group. Now, I’m going to show you what it looks like all together.

Overview of the 5-Day Challenge Components

Michelle:
It’s like a little graph or chart, an overview of the whole event. This is how a participant will experience your challenge. First, the opt-in page. They sign up, they go to the thank you page, they receive a confirmation email. Great. Then from days one through five, the email links two, if you’re using a Facebook group, it can link directly to the Facebook post or link directly to your group. Whatever kind of group you’re using. Days three through five will definitely also link to wherever they could buy your online course. And then in the background, you’ve got that awesome archive page. Rocking for anybody who needs to catch up on anything. This is your event. It’s like a five-day party and it can be really fun. It can be really energizing for both you and your participants. There’s another big thing that I like to include in my challenges, and I’ll have another chart to show that to you too, but let me explain it first.

The Power of Including Live Sessions

Michelle:
Especially if I’m promoting something, I’m trying to sell something like an online course I love including live broadcasts. So these could be meetings with your participants that you’re holding through Zoom, or they could be Facebook Live, but something where you’re actually on camera together. I like to do these during the challenge week. Again, there’s no one way to do these, but I typically will do a live session on days one through five at the same time of day every day, and it’s an opportunity to expand on that day’s topic. Also, to interact with all of the different people who are in the challenge answer questions, and it makes the whole experience a lot more personal. Also, sometimes I find there’s something that comes up that I wasn’t anticipating. Let’s say day one. I say drink lemon water, and all of a sudden people start talking about, “Oh gosh, I don’t know, making smoothies.” And I wasn’t planning to talk about making smoothies.

Michelle:
But if I have that live happening later in the day, that’s an opportunity to talk about making smoothies, and meet people where they’re at. If everybody wants to go in a certain direction, I use those lives to go there with them. It helps increase engagement when you have these types of events throughout your challenge and it’s giving you another opportunity every day to get in front of your people, that’s important. It’s rare that somebody’s going to sign up for a challenge and they’re going to read every word of every email that you send. Probably not. But if you send them five things, maybe they read two or three of them. If you send them 10, you’re setting them reminders. Now they’re going to come to your live event. Maybe you have 10 opportunities to get in front of them and maybe they get to three or four. The more you’re offering, the more chances you have to establish a relationship with these people. Of course, if I’m selling an online course at the end of a challenge, I would use these lives to mention my course whenever it was relevant and maybe even share some client success stories.

How to Host Live Sessions

Michelle:
Here’s how I host the live sessions. First, choose a time of day. It’s much easier for all involved if you do it at the same time every day. If you only want to do one live throughout your five days, that’s okay. You could just do one or two, whatever. But like I said, if you can take advantage of those five days to get in front of your people. Let’s say I’m going to do a live every evening at 8:00 PM around 7:30, I’ll have a scheduled email reminder with the link and tell my participants why they should show up. Let me show you what this looks like when we map it out.

How to Encourage People to Join Live

Michelle:
There we go. Again, you want to tell them why they should show up that night, not just because they want to see your face on screen. I mean, I think we all have had enough with someone’s face on the screen. Hopefully, you’re not sick of mine right now, but if I told you, “Come to my Live tonight because I’m going to be doing a cooking demo, I’m going to be demonstrating something.” Or maybe I’m going to be sharing a personal story that I’ve never shared before, or I’m going to be answering your questions live, or whatever it is, you want to make it sound like something that they cannot afford to miss, and it should just be a natural extension of whatever the topic of the day was.

Michelle:
By the way, I can make these slides available if anybody wants them, because I know it’s a lot to take in, But I want to move on to the very, very, very, very, very, very, very important topic of promotion because there’s no challenge if there’s no promotion because there’s no promotion, then there are no participants, and that’s sad and lonely and we definitely don’t want that to happen.

Prioritize Promoting Your Online Wellness Challenges

Michelle:
First, you need that compelling topic or promise of your challenge. You can try, you can run ads, you can buy a billboard on the highway. You can try to promote anything, but it’s got to be something that people want to sign up for if the promotions are going to work. That’s number one right there. What do they want? Let’s assume you have that. Great. Well, now what most practitioners will do is, “Oh wow, I’m running a challenge. That’s wonderful. I’m going to post it to Facebook.” They do. And a couple people sign up maybe, and then maybe we post about it again a week or two later, or maybe we email our very tiny mailing list about it and then we wonder how come we only have five or six people signed up for this?

Michelle:
During your challenge promotional period, which should be about three weeks in my experience, you want to take advantage of all avenues and you want to repeat your message again and again in lots of different ways. Here is a sample promotional calendar just to give you an idea you don’t have to follow this exactly, but just to give you an idea of what it would look like. This is what it takes. Use Facebook, yes, use Instagram, use whatever you’ve got, whether you’ve got wherever you have followers, that’s where you want to be with this message. And post maybe three or four times a week, either explicitly advertising your challenge. The post would be like, “I have this thing coming up.” Great, that’s what the post is all about or you can mention your challenge contextually within a different sort of post. So maybe it’s a post that’s like a recipe and it’s a picture of food, but then you segue into talking about how this is dairy free.

Michelle:
Just like all the recipes you’ll be sharing during your event for women with endometriosis. So there’s lots of different ways that you could be mentioning it, but you do want to do it over and over and over, because again, people are not out there hanging on every word that you publish. They’re really not. They might see, I don’t know, half of it. If we’re lucky, they might actually pay attention to a quarter of it if we’re lucky, right? You want to have it out there again and again, same thing with your email list. Don’t email once, don’t email twice. Email five, six times about your challenge during this time period. Some of your emails will be explicit, I have an event coming up. Click here to sign up. Starts tomorrow. Like that’s fine. You can have a couple of those very straight emails that are truly promotional.

Michelle:
Other emails might talk about a related topic, again, like sharing a recipe. Then within that, mention the event, link to it, put it in the PS. But again, get it out there multiple times. Don’t forget, this doesn’t all have to happen online. Some of us are sick of communicating online, right sometimes it’s like too much social media. That’s okay. We all live in the real world too. So reach out to people who you think would love to participate. Invite them directly, text message them, talk to them face to face, You know what I mean? You can do it all these old-school ways. Send an email, make a phone call. Remember those. You’re having a party. So invite people however it feels most comfortable for you. All right, let’s keep talking about the promotional stuff because honestly, you can’t do enough of this. Another smart way to promote your challenge is by having a partner.

Partner up and Boost Promotion

Michelle:
I know it sounds a little bit weird, but hear me out. You can even have multiple partners. If we go back to that example that I showed you, and actually I will show you again so we can look at it together. This is where I partnered with Annemarie’s Skincare. See their logo? See how it’s nice and big. Every company likes that. And it says, brought to you in collaboration with Annemarie’s Skincare. I tailored the look of this page to mesh with their branding colors and fonts. It’s like if their company and my company had a baby, this is what it would look like. That’s what we did here. In fact, the entire concept of this challenge is based around their marketing department’s idea of living ageless because it works really well for what they sell, of course, skincare and what I offer at the same time.

Michelle:
This was 100% a collaborative effort. I ran the event itself, I did all of the work, and I showed up every day and it was still my event, top to bottom. But they promoted it in an email to their list and they provided a giveaway prize, kind of fun. I got exposure to their audience, which is huge. I mean, do whatever you can to get your stuff in front of other audiences. That’s how you grow exponentially. They got exposure to my audience so it really was a win-win. I would highly advise you before you decide on anything for your challenge, I want you to think about finding a partner. It’s not required. It’s definitely not required, but it’s a really, really, really good idea. So I hope that you’ll try. Once you start doing this, you’ll realize you’re reaching exponentially more people.

Michelle:
You can think about, is there anybody that I already have a relationship with? I partner with Annemarie’s Skincare because I’ve been an affiliate with them for over 10 years, and I’ve really built that relationship. But if I think back, one of the first events that I ever did, I partnered with a yoga studio where I was teaching part-time. So again, I had a relationship with them, they had an audience for me. Awesome. That’s the kind of mojo you want to look for. Do you have any connections to small businesses or to a complimentary practitioner approach them? You could say, “I’m running this event and I would love to feature you, or I would love to feature your products.” Make it sound like a no-brainer for them.

Selling an Online Course Post-Challenge? Follow Up Until The Deadline

Michelle:
Last but certainly not least, if you’re trying to sell something like an online course, you want to follow up with emails until the registration deadline. Maybe the challenge runs days one through five and registration closes a week later. That gives you a week to email your participants reminding them about why your course is so super valuable. I find that you’ll get some sales during the challenge itself, but most sales happen after the fact with the follow-ups. So don’t fall down on those. They are super duper important.

Recap: How to Create an Online Challenge

Michelle:
All right, let’s do a little recap. We’re going to start with a strategy. Why are we doing this challenge? In today’s example, we used a live five-day challenge, right? As our example and the idea that we want to sell, we’re going to measure success based on selling an online course. Then we’re very clear about how we’re going to measure success. Of course, then you have to choose a topic and outline and prepare your materials. Promotion can happen concurrently. I say that because you could spend a year writing out your materials and never actually get to the part where you’re promoting or you’re signing people up.

Michelle:
I like to start signing people up right away, because let me tell you, when you have people already signed up for your event or you’re going to get down to business and write those emails real quick. That’s how I like to roll in my business. But do what works for you. Promotion can happen concurrently though. As soon as you’ve identified a topic and a possible partner, build that page, start getting people signed up and finally you’ll run your challenge. If everything is prepared in advance, it’s actually really fun. It can be really chill. Because if you have it all scheduled, you already did all the work, you sit back, you engage with your audience, you really present with them, you have the super fun week of doing the work. That’s why we are in these professions, right? Not because we want to market ourselves all day long.

Michelle:
We want to be able to do the work with people and change lives. This is your opportunity to do that, helping people see how amazing it is to be supported by you. Then of course we’ll be eager to take the next step. So we’ve been using this example of running a live five-day challenge in order to sell an online course as that next step.

Michelle:
Now, you might not have an online course right now, you might be selling private coaching or something else, or maybe you’re going to run your five-day challenge for another reason and you’re not going to sell anything at all. You’re going to focus on building your list or something else. But if you do like the idea of having an online course, you are in luck because I have a free five-day challenge, or I’m calling it a five-day bootcamp. You can do that. It can be a five-day event of any kind. But I have a five-day bootcamp coming up this October to teach you very specifically how to create and launch your very own course. And you can sign it for free at healthcoachpower.com/bootcamp. I mean, at the very least, you should go and check out the opt-in page and compare it to what we’ve talked about today. We’ll send everybody over to that link somewhere in the text, right, Brittany?

Brittany:
Yeah, exactly. All of those links will be below in the description so you can go and sign up for the event. If you’re catching this later, still go to Michelle’s website. She’s got so many resources I’m sure to support you on your journeys. That was incredible. Thank you so much, Michelle. I just feel so lit up when I’m a part of these sessions, all this amazing information shared, you really spelled it out for people. I think it’s so important for practitioners to deliver these quick wins, really to show people what they’re capable of and if they can deliver these types of wins in five days, what they could really bring to the table if a client does go onto the bigger offering. So yeah, I loved it. I also really loved how you clarified this timeline of five days so that people stay engaged and you don’t have people peter off and fall off.

I know that that happened all the time when I was first getting started. I have to say, it’s really tough on the morale for the practitioner too. If it goes to crickets, then you’re going to feel like, “What’s wrong with me? Why aren’t people sticking around?” And it can really lead to that imposter syndrome feeling and feelings of self-doubt. Especially if you’re a new practitioner, starting with these smaller windows of time is great for the clients. It’s great for you to have their energy and their quick wins so that you feel like you can build this momentum and start to really work with clients. I loved that aspect of this and you really just-

Michelle:
It’s like when you’re watching a series, I’m trying to think of really great series. When it was over, I was sad. Oh my gosh, I can’t think of one right now. But a show you’re watching and when it ends you’re like, “No.” Isn’t there going to be another season? That’s how you want them to feel. As opposed to shows like Dexter, when Dexter ended, I was like, “Ugh, this show’s writing got bad at the end.” And you’re just happy that it’s over, right? We want to give them the first experience.

Brittany:
Exactly. Exactly. I always say it’s like a book hangover when you finish a really good book and you’re just kind of like, “Oh, I don’t want to be done, kind of feeling.”

Michelle:
You don’t want to be done.

Brittany:
Funneling these people down so that they’re like, they’re getting kind of that feeling from you. So thank you so much again for joining us. Well, like we said, include all of these links to Michelle’s challenge, her website, her Facebook group so people can connect with you further. Otherwise, thanks again and I’m sure we’ll connect soon.

Michelle:
That was great being here. Have a good time everyone. See you later.

Brittany:
Bye.

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