Should You Run a 5-Day Challenge to Grow Your Coaching Business?

Determine Your Motives for Doing a 5-Day Challenge

Are you looking to rapidly build your list or audience, or have a cash injection to your business? Or all 3? Knowing why you want to run a 5-day challenge is key to its success. Determine if your challenge should be free or paid. If you have an audience but not a lot of engagement, you might want to run a paid challenge to change things. If you have an active community but they're not buying, then a free challenge might be just the thing they need. 

Decide if You Have The Time to Deliver a 5-Day Challenge Properly

A 5-day challenge has a lot of set-up, is very hands on, and has the same intensity and the same high energy as a product launch. You cannot phone it in, because everyone will know that's what you're doing. This defeats the purpose of a 5-day challenge, and you won't ever want to repeat the experience again if you don't have enough time.

Be Prepared to Repurpose or Create

You will need a lot of content when delivering a 5-day challenge. Some of it you may already have - scripts for videos, marketing templates and workbooks. You will still need to brand-it for your challenge participants and create content that plugs the gaps. Often. challenge participants will bring a notebook, but many 5 day challenge creators give their participants workbooks, action guides, and planners.  This is the norm for 5-day challenges, and if you decide to offer a quick challenge without these things, you may not be compared favorably.

Know Your Tech

You will need to capture email addresses, have emails in place for your challenge, have your challenge content ready... And have it all on hand for when you need it. This means using a tool like Trello or Asana to map out where everything is, and what needs to be done next. 

It helps to create a timeline combining your repurposing/creation and tech activities so that you know you're on track. 

Know Your Audience

If your audience love LinkedIn, holding a 5-day challenge on Facebook may be the kiss of death for your challenge. Show up where your audience is the happiest. This will help ensure maximum engagement and comfort. If in doubt... Ask! 

Offer Prizes for Showing Up / Engaging

Facebook Groups will give you insights so you can see who the most engaged members are. Upviral can create an engagement leaderboard for you. Offer a range of prizes from low cost / high value (eBooks) to a place on your high ticket program.  You can even offer something special to everyone who comments 'hello' on your training post for 5 consecutive days.

When you make your audience feel excited they start to look forward to your sessions and know they will be rewarded if they stay the distance with you. 

Give Value

You'll be surprised at the number of people who deliver a challenge but don't want to teach something valuable to their participants. They're frightened that if they teach someone how to brand their slides, they won't ever be able to generate sales for their slide branding course. You should think of your challenge as a taster. It's a delicious bite of the main course. It's not a full meal. 

Have Something to Sell

You may see #TeamSparks member Sarah Arrow on our livestreams and training. She'll be the first to tell you that revving up an audience and getting them excited, but not having anything to sell, makes people unhappy. She knows because she's had 750,000 people go through her blogging challenge. Your people want to move onto the next step with you, and if you don't know what it is or what your audience wants, then you won't earn from your challenge. 

What you promote at the end of your challenge should be aligned with what people learned in the challenge itself. If you're doing a cat-care challenge offering dog training sessions at the end of it, you're not going to get any up-take at the end of you sessions. Trying to justify it with "they like pets, they might have a dog..." is a waste of everyone's time! 

Know That You Will Need to Repeat the Process

No challenge is perfect the first time you deliver it. It's not going to be perfect the second time either. By the time you deliver the 3rd one, you're more fluid with the process and the questions people ask. Then you're ready for more!

Next Steps

You've read our tips on 5-day challenges, so would you like our help in creating one? Because if you need one, so will your audience and you could be the person that shows them how they work!

Click below to download the FREE 5-Day Challenge Planner!

Are you ready to build an audience of buyers for your online courses?

With our ready-to-go 5-day challenge, you’ll get everything you need to create your own 5-day challenge (free or paid) that helps people determine if your course is perfect for them.

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