How To Creative a Challenge People Will Love: Part One

This month in The Coffee Club, our monthly Masterclass for April was all about How To Create a Successful Five Day Challenge. However, whilst creating a purposeful and engaging Challenge is a lot of fun, the question on many people’s lips was this:

“But what if no one signs up to my challenge?”

A very important question. Too often creatives pour their heart and soul into creating some truly amazing content and then are devastated when only a few people come to share in the experience.

We often identify two main problems, when it seems like no one is singing up for our challenge:

I’m getting no or very little traffic to my page and no one is signing up
I’m getting some traffic to my page but no one is signing up

In most cases, we are given to believe, the primary culprit is lack of traffic.

This is the primary issue which this series hopes to address. However, it must be said, before we get into the realm of social media and content plans, traffic is not the only issue. Because you can get all the traffic in the world to come to your site – but if you don’t have a clear way to sign up to your challenge and you haven’t created a compelling challenge, no amount of traffic will help.

So, before we talk about traffic there are two other dragons which we must slay.

Creating and communicating an irresistible offer, and
Creating a cohesive plan.

We can have thousands of people flooding to our page, but in this competitive world we really need to have a offer that’s going to totally knock our visitor’s socks off.

Not only that, but when we drive traffic to this offer, we need to do so in a methodical way. By picking a few, well thought out strategies and implementing them with a plan. Rather that testing every single method of promotion haphazardly and infrequently.

First we will talk about making our offer the best it can be, part two will talk about being strategic in the promotion of your challenge and part three we deal with how we can best drive traffic to your challenge.

So, let us talk first about making our offer the best is can be.

Part One

Make Your Offer Irresistible

The day of the ‘subscribe for updates’ button is well and truly dead. Sad to say.

In the sea of online content, free courses and challenges there is one thing your visitor is looking for. Specificity.

They may not phrase it this way but what we are all looking for is content and advice specific to us. Think about it. When you see advice, a set or steps to take or a thirty day course, isn’t one of your first thoughts – will this work for me?

The good news is that by making sure your course is immediately and obviously tailored towards a specific person, you’ve already blown most of the competition out the water. For example, if you are a photographer struggling to get traffic to your site and you see a post: Five Ways To Get Traffic to Your Site. You might well be interested.

However, if there is a post right next to it that says Five Ways For Photographers To Get More Traffic to Their Site, or even better, Five Ways Photographers Can Get More Client’s Today (ie addressing the actual root of the problem), which one would you pick?

So, a few things to really hone in on.

Get Specific – about the person

If you’ve been running a business for a while, then you will be aware of how important it is to find your niche. By being specific with your products/services and branding you can be more effective in attracting paying customers.

If this is brand new information to you right now, don’t worry: read this post on “How To Find Your Niche” first and come back to us.

This advice also runs true when creating and putting together the copy for your challenge. You want to be able to communicate to a very specific person.

The idea is that you don’t just want to a person to arrive, see your offer and think ‘hm, that might be useful for me’. You want that person to arrive and think ‘wow, it’s like they are actually speaking to me directly’.

So in the example above we talked about appealing to photographers. Ideally we want to get even more specific than that.

Think about who your course will be the most useful for. Is it for food photographers? Still life photographers? Travel photographers?

Go deeper again and think about the sub-categories within that category, for example travel photographers that only shoot with iPhones or still life photographers that specialize in shooting floral arrangements.

Get as specific about the person as you can.

You want to be able to address that person in such a way that they legit believe you have physic powers.

Get Specific – about the problem

The second and equally, if not more important part of this equation, is the problem.

The ‘thing’ that your specific audience member has being struggling with. This is what you have created your challenge/course/opt-in to help them solve.

I should note at this point that finding the problem itself, is not enough.

It’s a great start but you also want to make sure that this problem is an urgent problem. A problem that your audience member needs to resolve right now.

The sense of urgency is the difference between someone thinking ‘oh, that’s a great challenge, I’ll come back to that later, when I have time’ and someone thinking ‘OMG I’ve been looking everywhere for this – sign me up.’

So in your copy and call to action, not only should you be addressing your specific person but also their specific problem.

Don’t Fall At The Last Hurdle

The final icing on the cake is the actual button itself. After all that time writing all this amazing copy and thinking about how to talk to your target audience, it can be ever so easy to forget to change the text on that ‘sign up’ button. It happens, we’ve all been there.

Don’t get too fancy, however, it still needs to be clear that by clicking that button your audience member will be taken to your sign up form/challenge/opt-in.

Conclusion

And that my friends brings us to an end of part one. I hope this has given you lots of ideas about ways you might like to structure, promote and share your challenge with your audience.

It's not how many different methods of promotion you use but how you use themClick To Tweet

I hope you enjoyed this post and found it useful. I would be a hypocrite if I were to not take my own advice here and kindly ask you to share this post if you think it’s something your own audience could benefit from.

Any questions, of course, just pop them in the comments below. In part two we are talking about how to increase conversions.

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