How to Create A Profitable 7-Day Challenge

Tonya was a health and wellness coach who specialized in working with postpartum women who wanted to return to their previous fitness level. She loved helping her virtual clients change their lives, but she often found herself frustrated because she was constantly looking for new clients.

She wanted a way that she could regularly fill her coaching classes without needing to constantly market them. That’s when Tonya’s friend—who was an online marketer—suggested hosting a 7-Day Challenge.

What is a 7-Day Challenge?

If you’re not familiar with the concept, a 7-day challenge is a challenge where you invite your target market to accomplish a goal over the course of seven days. Each day, you will present daily content and challenge the participants to execute a mini task – something specific to accomplish in order to help them reach that big-picture goal, which will produce a quick win.

I’ve discovered that online challenges are a fast and profitable strategy to grow your email list, demonstrate your expertise and bond with your audience so you become the obvious choice to buy from.

Popular 7-Day Challenges

Let’s imagine that you’d be interested in a popular home organization coach who may host a 7-Days to Clutter Free Closets Challenge. Each day during the challenge, the host will share tips and advice on how to clear out those household closets. At the end of each day’s lesson, she shares a quick homework assignment and invites her participants back to her Facebook group where they can share pictures of their progress.

After the challenge, the coach invites her participants to sign up to work with her virtually. This means she has a convenient sales funnel of new clients that are continually joining her business.

Here are several challenges I’ve run successfully using this idea:

• The Power of Gratitude Challenge
• 7 Day Website Challenge
• Double Your Sales Challenge
• The Power of Setting Smart Goals
• 7 Days to Rock Your Year
• 7 Days of Self Care Challenge
• 7 Days to Boost Your Income
• Your Next 100 Subscribers Challenge
• Build Your Simple Sales Funnel in Just 7 Days

Now, hosting a 7-Day challenge might sound like a lot of work. But once you set it up the first time, you can run it again and again. The only changes will be that you stop in and interact with a new round of participants on Facebook.

Advantages of Hosting a 7-Day Challenge

Challenges are the quickest, easiest, lowest-risk launch there is. Hosting a challenge is also a fun and effective way to engage your audience. Your prospects and clients grow closer to you and your business, which improves customer retention, sales, and free word-of-mouth advertising.

Sometimes improving the bottom line, your financial viability and profits, is your primary desired result. Certainly, in all of those cases and others, hosting a 7-Day Challenge is truly a marketing win-win for your business and your target audience. Yes, it truly can deliver the outcome you’re looking for.

Challenges are also a lot of fun. Don’t overlook this simple aspect of a customer challenge. When you add personal enjoyment for your participants, this marketing tool provides fun for both you and them.

So, let’s take a look at five of the top advantages of hosting a 7-Day Challenge, so you understand the importance of this powerful marketing tool for your business.

Advantage #1: Grow Your Mailing List

A mailing list is a valuable asset for an online business owner. That’s because email has a return on investment of $38 to every $1 spent (HubSpot). Not only that but you own the rights to your email address.

When you build your business around a social media platform, you don’t own the contact information for your followers. The platform does. This means that if you get mistakenly marked as a spammer and your account is deleted, you have no more access to your followers. All those hours you spent pouring into your social media account are gone.

Unless you were working diligently to build an email list. Then you can still keep in touch with your followers and fans. You can continue to do business as usual without having to worry about filling your client funnel.

Advantage #2: Re-Engage Your Subscribers

You might be thinking that a 7-day challenge sounds lovely. But your email list might be dead or close to dying. You rarely send out messages and when you do, you get a lot of unsubscribes and more than a few confused replies.

A 7-Day challenge can be the perfect way to re-engage your subscribers. Not only is this free for them but it gives them a chance to interact with your brand again, reminding them of who you are and why they value your products or services.

Of course, not every email subscriber will necessarily want to receive messages from you about the 7-day challenge you have coming up. What you can do is email your main list. Let subscribers know that if they don’t want to receive messages on this topic, they can opt-out.

Then use the tagging feature from your email service provider to automatically tag those users as “not interested in (challenge)”. When you go to message your subscribers in the future, you’ll select the option to exclude subscribers with that particular tag.

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Advantage #3: Build Your Facebook Community

Another advantage of this approach is that you can build your Facebook community. While you never want to rely exclusively on social media to find your clients, you can use it to build a community of like-minded clients who love working with you.

You can do this by encouraging your subscribers to share their progress on your social media group. It might be wise to start a special challenge-related hashtag so your other participants can easily follow threads that are related to this topic. For example, if you’re hosting a Clutter-Free Closet Challenge then your hashtag could be #closetchallenge or #clutterfreecloset, or #nocluttercloset.

As your participants post, relationships within your community will begin to form. They’ll ask questions, cheer each other on, and share tips or advice. You might even find some of this inspires you to create more content for your members!

Another benefit of doing this is that members of your Facebook community might see the challenge and join your mailing list. This allows you to grow your subscriber base, even more, resulting in more potential clients.

Advantage #4: Turn Your Community into Action Takers

An online community is only as strong as its action takers. If you have a community filled with people who never act on your advice and recommendations, then you have a dead community. It’s not truly growing, and it needs to be pruned.

You can use the 7-day challenge as the opportunity to look at how many subscribers you have and if they’re truly engaging with you and your business. If not, you may want to consider pruning them.

Members that are never active in your Facebook group or subscribers who are never opening your messages are taking up valuable space. Consider creating a guideline for yourself such as “subscribers who have not opened an email for 6 months are deleted”.

At first, deleting members who aren’t engaged with your brand might feel scary. But keep in mind that these people are not truly interested in what you’re offering. If they were, they would be taking action by reading your messages, replying to you, or engaging in the Facebook community you’re building.

When you’re done pruning, you’ll be left with fewer people, but it will be a more valuable list of subscribers and members since you’ll only have the action takers. These are your true fans and the people you really want to serve!

Advantage #5: Profit from Affiliate Offers

Depending on your business, a 7-Day Challenge could require a sizable investment. But hey, challenges can be low-cost!

In most cases though, you can structure a challenge that costs very little money to market, launch, and manage. Considering how effective 7-Day Challenges can be, the fact that literally, any business can afford to run them is one of the biggest benefits next to customer engagement.

While you might host your 7-day challenge for free, that doesn’t mean you can’t profit it from it. From the very beginning of your challenge, you need to be seeding in opportunities for clients to make purchases that will get you profits.

How you include these opportunities is up to you. But one good idea is to add affiliate or promotional offers where relevant to your challenge. For example, during your closet challenge, you reference a closet organizer. Don’t just mention it. Link to your favorite one on Amazon or another site.

If a tangible item isn’t appropriate, suggest a digital one. For example, if you’re doing a 7-day digital scrapbooking challenge, affiliate link to your favorite site that sells scrapbook paper bundles.

The important thing with these suggestions is to pick items that you know are of good quality and that will be helpful to your audience. If you do this, they won’t get angry at your recommendations. They’ll thank you for them!

Ready to Plan Your Challenge?

Do you want to enhance and grow your business while engaging and widening your customer base? Maybe you’re looking to build your brand, or perhaps your business goal is to boost your reputation as an authority in your field?

It doesn’t have to be difficult to host a challenge. Once you have a framework, it’s easy and fun. In fact, you can run your challenge again and again over the course of several years if you want.

Here’s the thing…

Throughout this article, I’ve shared several tips that will enable you to create a solid challenge and plan it out before you start.

Perhaps the best way to learn more about creating a profitable 7-Day Challenge is to experience one for yourself. With that in mind, I invite you to join my 7 Day Beat Procrastination Challenge to see how it all works.

The successful challenge launches happened to those that took massive action!

If you want to learn more, I’ve got an EPIC toolkit that teaches you EXACTLY how to set up, write emails for, run ads for, and CRUSH your own 7-Challenge!

Related: How to Launch Your Online Course With A 5-Day Challenge

Final Thoughts

Not only are 7-Day Challenges enjoyable and profitable for your business, but they also serve your community, too. Additionally, they are low cost, high reward and you don’t need a list to launch – you can launch to build your list.

That’s a win-win-win!

However, when it comes to self-improvement, two of the biggest stumbling blocks I see people encounter in general are a lack of motivation to get started and a fear that a goal will be too overwhelming.

Therefore, I often recommend 30-Day Challenges as a way to help people tackle both of those issues. A few of our more popular 30-Day Challenges include:

• 30 Day Time Management Challenge
• 30 Day Decluttering Challenge
• 30 Day Health Improvement Challenge
• 30 Day Financial Improvement Challenge

Look at life as if it’s a series of experiments. Change your habits for 30 days and see what happens.