How to Create an Engaging Challenge to Sell Your Digital Course Like Hotcakes
Challenges are one of the best ways to sell your online course. You can create excitement as your audience goes through your challenge material. In addition, a live challenge provides you, the host, an opportunity to build the know, like, and trust factor quickly, even for participants who had not interacted with you in the past.
After your live challenge launch, your challenge material can be set up in an evergreen sales funnel, so everything is automated, and you don’t have to lift a finger to enroll students into your online course.
In this post, I’ll walk you through how to set up a live challenge for your next online course launch.
Why Are Challenges So Popular?
Challenges have been increasing in popularity recently for several reasons. They are fun, engaging, interactive, and give actionable steps, which is excellent for anyone who signs up for your challenge.
They are relatively easy to manage for the host, and it’s basically like breaking up a traditional live webinar topic into several days. The more days that people spend with you before your launch, the more you can build that know, like, and trust factor.
Here are the five steps to take to set up your challenge launch:
Step 1: Determine the Length Of Your Challenge
The first step is to determine the length of your challenge. What makes the most sense for what you attendees will learn? The key is not to overwhelm them each day but not to add in fluff content. People join challenges for actionable steps and value-packed information.
When you figure out the length, it’s not just the content or topic that will help you determine the length, but it’s also your audience. How much time do they have right now? Is this generally a busy time of year for them? If that’s the case, you might want to try to cut your challenge length to a shorter time frame.
As a very loose and general rule, most challenges are 3 to 5 days. I prefer shorter rather than longer as your audience may lose attention and stop engaging the longer the challenge.
Step 2: Determine How The Challenge Will Be Delivered
Next, we want to think about the delivery of the challenge.
Will attendees need to join a private Facebook group to watch the live streams, or will you host them on Zoom?
Make sure you schedule reminders and replay emails for your attendees with either method. We want them to keep their level of excitement and take action throughout the challenge!
A few other questions to ask around planning delivery and customer experience for your attendees:
Will you have a Q&A session at the end of each day’s training?
Will you provide a workbook or worksheets each day or for the entire challenge?
Where will they be able to access a replay if they missed a day’s session?
Step 3: Plan and Create Content Around Your Days
Finally, we want to plan and create our content for each challenge day.
What is the focus each day?
What are three things attendees will learn each day?
What are their action steps after the challenge each day?
And make sure that the challenge topic, content, and plan lead them into the next step. If you’re hosting your challenge in a private Facebook group, plan to go live each day. This interaction will keep your audience engaged and moving through your challenge material.
Step 4: Determine Your Engagement Activities and Prizes
A huge part of a successful challenge is audience engagement. You want your audience interacting with each other, posting in the private Facebook group (if applicable), or participating in your Zoom webinars. One way to encourage audience participation is by giving away prizes.
Consider offering a Bingo card or something similar where your challenge participants can win prizes.
Step 5: Pitch Your Online Course (without being salesy)
On the final days of the challenge, you want to plan out your pitch or promote any exclusive offer or bonuses to attendees who are ready to take that next step and sign up for your course or program.
This is your opportunity to pitch your online course; you’ve earned this right by providing a ton of free value through your challenge. Throughout the week, let your participants know that you will have a special offer for them, so they know that you will be selling your course.
There you go! I love challenges to sell online courses, and good luck with yours!
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