Influencer Series: Online Challenges

Hey, my friends, it's Brendan. And welcome to another special episode in this new series for influencers. It's a sort of behind the scenes look into my career as an author, speaker, coach, seminar leader, online trainer, social media, thought leader, what we just call now the influencer industry. It's how I run my influencer career and I like to share some tactical things with you here in this episode that I know you'll love. Now, this audio is actually pulled from our Influencer business program. If you haven't heard what that is, that's where I go live every single month and I teach you. How do you build a personal brand? How do you get a bigger audience following you? How do you make money from that? How do you build community and impact? How do you launch podcasts and coaches courses and do email marketing and everything you see us doing? If you love that kind of thing, then man, I would love for you to join us at the Influencer 2019 event in San Diego. It's October 10th through 12th again in San Diego, California. And that's where you're going to come to learn from some of the best influencers in the world about how do you start and how do you really grow? How did we start from scratch and grow our brand and monetize content and reach more people and build a community of followers around the world and scale an actual business doing it? Just go to influencer tickets.com again, that's influencertickets.com to join us in San Diego October 10th through 12th where I say join us because it's a real community of people teaching you exactly how we started from scratch. It's people like Rachel Hollis, who, you know, has had two back to back number one New York Times bestsellers. One of the most successful, successful authors in the world today, Dean Graziosi, who he and Tony Robbins just did a $30 million online launch. Lewis Howes podcast extraordinary at the school of greatness. Trent Shelton, one of the absolute best viral video makers in the world and inspiration to so much of our youth. Tom Bilyeu, who built a billion dollar brand and now runs the Impact Theory show, which I love so much and so many more real influencers teaching you. How did we do it? I mean, listen, there's no question, if you listen to me, you've been impacted, I hope, by what I do. And I'm just here to say, why can't you do that? You know, why can't you have a similar career? It's not like I'm some magician or have some Magical abilities. I had to learn to identify what topic and passions I wanted to follow. Just like we'll teach you. I had to learn how to build a personal brand and audience, just like will teach you. And I had to learn ultimately, how do you actually earn an income and earn revenue from it, Building a business, doing it that you love to run. If you're in that game, my friend, go to influencertickets.com, join us October 10th through 12th in San Diego. I'm sure by the time you're hearing this, our tickets, there's probably only maybe a couple hundred left, I'm guessing. So please make sure you go check it out. Influencertickets.com it will give you all the dates, details and limitations because you gotta get there. If you're totally new to the industry, it's okay. This is especially where you want to come so you can meet new people in the industry, but also see how the best of the best do it and just follow our plans. Uh, you guys know I'm always saying, you know, coming from Montana, we always say the time to have the map is before you enter the woods. So if you're really into building a personal brand and a major audience, even if you're just starting, this is when you need to learn. Don't go. Try to figure it out yourself. Follow the strategies that work. We're teaching them at Influencer 2019 October 10th through 12th in San Diego. Again, go to influencertickets.com without further ado, please enjoy this training that I did live for our Influencer community. Please realize that I might reference something visual that maybe you can't see, but we've edited it in such a way that you can definitely follow these strategies, understand and and learn a lot of the behind the scenes of how the influencer space works, what you can be doing in marketing, and how to grow a real business doing it. With that, my friends, no further ado. Let's jump into this episode.

First, I want to talk about the topic of the hour today. How do you do online challenges? That's what we're talking about. So for those of you who are here for the very first time, that's what we're doing. A couple things I want to walk you through. One, let's talk online challenges. With online challenges, y', all, you have a kind of choices of how to do online challenges. You can do an online challenge where it's just a social media challenge and there's no email involved, where you're just going live or doing posts on social media and you're building value over a series of days and then you sell something. That's the whole big picture, right? It's your job is to engage community, add value, sell something. That's the real goal of this. So please write that down. I know it's simple. It's build community, add value, sell something that is, if you got that down, that's the macro level. Now we can break it down to all the different options because there's a lot of different options you could do that, make this really fun. Now, if you're brand new and you're somebody totally new to marketing and you've never collected emails before, you can do all this in social media. I am going to be very biased in the way I tell you how to do this today because we just have the data of what works best. And I'm going to spend most of my time today discussing a value driven challenge where you are collecting email. So we're going to use social media, we're going to use ads or use organic traffic and get as many people as we can to an opt in page to register for our challenge. Now, I know some of you, I don't need to do that. I can just start the challenge, announce the challenge. You know, I can just tell them on Instagram, hey, I'm starting on Monday. I'm going to do a challenge right here on Instagram and you're going to just do your challenge on Instagram. I think that's really great and you're totally okay to do that. However, if you care about this little thing called lifetime value of a customer, in other words, you are a business person. So if you're a business person, you care about lifetime value of the customer. If you want lifetime value of a customer, of course you're going to want to collect email in your online challenge. It was the number one question we got before this is like, do I need to be able to do email marketing to do an online challenge? And I'm like, no, you could do it. You could totally do it just on Facebook, just on Instagram, just on YouTube, just on your blog, if you want it. But the truth is, if you care about lifetime value, I'm going to be like, guys, gals, please collect email. So let me talk you through conceptually what you already probably saw with us and we'll break down the details as we go. So here's what we want to do.

I want to break down Transformation Week for you.

And so Transformation Week is a good example of a Basic winning challenge that you guys can do anytime. Okay, it's very simple. Transformation Week. All we did is I went on social, we ran ads to an opt in page and we said, hey, for seven days we're going to have this challenge where we help you transform every area of your life, your relationships, your career, your health, your ability to serve your mission and to be your best. It's called Transformation Week and it starts on so and so date. So this was a real time challenge and you should write this down. It was a real time challenge, meaning we were saying it's going to start on the first of the month. So for about 10 days prior to it starting, I would go live on Instagram and Facebook, I'd be talking about the concepts we're going to do and I'd invite them to register for the challenge. You know, if I'm on Instagram, I say click the link in my bio to register for the challenge. If I'm on Facebook, click the link in the post to register my challenge. And they would go to a page where they could register for Transformation Week again, capturing their name and email critical to long term value. So again, I'm going to teach that strategy. Lots of basic questions we get. If I can just set up sort of the pace with you. People always ask Brendan, how long should the challenge be? Should it be 5 days, 10 days, 15, 20 days, 30 days? Don't do 30 day challenges. Don't do 60 day challenges. Don't do 90 day challenges. Uncle Brendan's going to help you right here by telling you, do a five day or seven day challenge. That's it. I'm saving you so much time and energy, I'm giving you the data from the industry. You're not going to have that much more bang for the buck doing a 15 day challenge, a 30 day challenge or 90 day challenge than you are in literally a five day or seven day challenge. They're just as lucrative, believe it or not. So the challenge, like Transformation Week, Transformation Week was. Here's what we need to know. Transformation Week was, are you. So we basically would send them to a page, opt in here, and for the next seven days, we're going to send you a new email every day with video training for improving your life. A new video every day to change your life. Now every day I would also go on social media and say, hey guys, if you haven't joined our challenge, make sure you click the link in my bio or in this post to register for the challenge. So even as the challenge is going so let's say Transformation Week 1 runs from the 1st of the month to the 7th of the month. If I spent 10 days getting people to register, even as the challenge is going, I'm still trying to get people on social media to register the whole time. I'm trying to get people to register all the way until the last day. I'm still trying to get people to register for the challenge. Right, For a real time challenge. That's really important. Just constantly be talking about it on Instagram, Facebook, constantly be talking about it on Twitter, wherever else you have your social media. Be in just absolute continual conversation. And that will be critical to building that email list as much as you can. Now, here's the basics of it. They entered their name and email for Transformation Week. We delivered a new video to them every single day for seven days. And then at the end of the seven days, we left it all up just for three days. So for those who thought transformation was a 10 day challenge, it was really a seven day challenge with three days that we left it up, which I'll.

Tell you about why in a minute.

Okay.

It's Brendan. And yeah, I'm going to serve you up a quick little promotion right here to make sure you learn a little bit more with us. If you're enjoying this, dive deep. And there's two ways that you can do that. One, obviously I told you about at the beginning of this episode where you can join us at Influencer 2019, October 10th through 12th in San Diego. Because if you love this kind of stuff, come learn how 10 other people do it just like I do it. But also, if for whatever reason you can't make San Diego, October 10th through 12th, then join our Influencer Business Program. That's where I go live. Just like you've been hearing. And I teach every month how to build your personal brand, how to do better marketing and make it really, really specific so that there's tactical things you can do. And I teach, really the world's influencers. Every single month. I go live. I do Q and A, I give a new strategy. I try to teach something that has earned at least six figures and I try to teach that every single month. So make sure you join that Influencer Business Program. If you can't join us live in San Diego, how do you do both? Well, just go to influencer magazine.com that's influencer magazine.com and choose your adventure. Do you want to come to the live event or would you like to join the Influencer Business Program, the online training Component, you get to choose multiple levels. So just go to influencermagazine.com and choose your own adventure with us. Would you like to join us at the live event or would you like to join the online program? And hint, hint, hint, the online program does come with some tickets to the live event as well because it's an ongoing subscription. And Influencer, the live event, is an annual event. So are you confused? Are you ready? Are you excited to start? Would you like to share your passions, your wisdom with the world and achieve financial freedom, lifestyle freedom, and most importantly, real impact? Y' all go to Influencer magazine right now. All right, with that, let's jump right back into the episode.

Now, so far, I've introduced one type of model to you, which was the real time model, where you're, you know, for 10 days, you're leading up to the challenge. It's going to start on the 1st, it's going to go through the 7th, right? That's a real time challenge. You give them the date when it starts. That's called a real time challenge. However, I really want to encourage you guys to also test because, hey, listen, this is Influencer business program, and everything in the marketing world is about testing. I would love for you to also test doing an Evergreen challenge. What is an Evergreen Challenge? Okay, so remember, there's a real time challenge or an evergreen challenge. The real time challenge, it starts on a specific date and you're building up to that date. Then it starts in Evergreen Challenges. They go to the same opt in page, but they can start it right now. I mean, it runs all the time. It runs all the time. So they enter their name and email. Bam. They get day one of the challenge. Next day, day two, day three, day four, day five, day six, day seven. There's no warmup. They don't have to wait. They start the challenge immediately. And you can run ads at it, not just 10 days prior to it, all the time, because it begins automatically. That makes sense. So that is called an Evergreen challenge, and it's incredibly powerful. It's very much like those who've been with us for a long time. You know, the OVO model, the opt in value offer, it's basically that same model, but just as a challenge. So you're getting people to opt in.

Enter their name and email for a.

Challenge, and then they get the value. You give them specific things to do, and then you sell the recordings. Now, I know some of you are going to ask, well, Brendan, do I have to sell the recordings? And I was like, no. You have to sell the recordings. You can sell your thing like we sell coaching, but we bonus in the recordings. Because believe me, if someone goes through a challenge, inevitably they're going to miss something and they want it. So what we do is we were actually selling coaching, but we're bonusing in the recordings. And people go nuts for that. That's what they kind of like. So that's our approach to it. And you can obviously sell anything you want. Everyone here sells different things. Many of you sell, you know, memberships, many of you sell products online, courses, programs, widgets, whatever you sell. This is a good way to do it, is offer the product at the end and then bundle in the recordings of the challenge itself. Now, I know some of you go, but in an Evergreen Challenge, aren't the pages up all the time? The answer is yes. But they want access to it all in one place. They're not going to go dig through all their emails, because how many of you guys get too many emails a day? They want access to it in one place. They want the recordings in there forever. And of course they know you're not going to host the challenge on your page forever. And you tell them that, you say, hey, listen, this is your chance to get it and own it. And that's really important, too. Now, number three, what works and challenges is on the page where your challenge is hosted. If you're doing a hosted challenge, meaning it's on your own webpage, right? They registered their name and email to go through the challenge. Now you're delivering them videos, and those videos are delivered on your website and on that page, imagine it's just a video at the top. Then there's a chat role, just like you guys have right down below. That's chat roll down below. But you can use Facebook comments too, or some blog post software for chat, discuss, etc. But you want them to be able to interact. But then right below that, you want to have a band of Listen to this, guys, and write this down. Recommended products that go along with that supplement or support the challenge. So let me give you an example. On Transformation Week, when you're going through Transformation Week, there's a video, there's a chat roll, but then it says recommended resources, and there's my planner, right? And so in the videos, I'm saying, hey, guys, if you really need help transform your life, make sure you click the button down below the chat roll and get yourself a planner so you can stay more organized. Or I had my supplement, or I had, you know, one of My coaching programs. What you want to do is make sure you have recommended resources. If you're like, brendan, I don't even have other products and programs, then link to something on Amazon as an affiliate or link to somebody else's product or program. But what you want in a challenge is in this. This is really important because people miss this all the time. You want the video, you want the chat, but you want recommended resources. Because recommended resources does two things. One, it adds the value of telling them how to go further. But two, it also frames it like, oh, there's things for sale in this thing. Cool. And they're learning about your brand, which is critical. They're learning about your brand. You want to feature your most important products and programs as you're talking throughout the challenge. So they're learning about your business and what you do. Because the challenge is way more for you to build your brand to create bonding and connection with the customer for you to get sales than it is just to do a social media challenge. Do social media challenge. It's a business reason. There's a business reason you want to do this. And in very few places other than in a challenge can you talk so much about your business, your brand, and your products so openly. Where people are like, this is great because they feel like they're learning about you as part of the challenge. And so another piece of advice here is to make sure that the challenge is based on something that you are able to share your personal story with. Meaning make sure the challenge is something you were challenged with. And they're part. They're along the ride as you're kind of debriefing and sharing what you struggled with. And then you're giving them the tactics to how to deal with it, and you're giving them a challenge of what to do about it. So, for example, transformation week, our challenge is, hey, we're transforming our life. We're moving, starting new brand together. My wife Denise and I, if you missed it, it's like, we're moving. We're starting new brand together. We're working together. First time. We're on camera together. The first time. Here's that whole transformational journey and how challenging it is and what we had to do to practice our own high performance habits so we could build this new brand, this new team in this.

New land called Puerto Rico together.

And meaning, you're taking the audience along for the ride of your journey, and you're teaching them tactical things they can do. And then you're asking for the challenge. You're telling them to do something specific. Usually post something on social media using a very specific hashtag. Like ours was Transformation Week. And that's the basics and the fundamentals, like the big picture of it. Now let's talk about what really can help you amplify the effectiveness of all this. Number one, again, run ads to get people to register. And for those who are like, I don't want to run ads at anything that's, that's expensive. Well, you should, you should run ads at it, but at a level it makes sense for your budget and see how it works. Like build the challenge and see how many people are buying your recommended resources throughout it. At the very end of the challenge, how many people buy the recordings of the challenge because that's what you want. At the end of your challenge, no matter how many days it is, you want to do a 72 hour close down. A 72 hour close down in which you say, hey, if you missed any of it, buy these recordings and it's at this discounted price and you get these bonuses with it, right? So for us, Transformation Week, hey, if you missed any Transformation Week, click here. To sign up for our coaching program, you'll get Transformation Week all the recordings, the audios, the videos and the worksheets we for free just for signing up for coaching. And tell you what, if you sign up today within the deadline, we'll also throw in an online course for you called Reignite youe Life. So that's what our offer was. It was, you get the recordings, you enter our coaching program as a member and you get a course. Our price point on Transformation Week to get that was to join our coaching program which is just $49 a month. So that's what we were doing Transformation Week for was to help people obviously transform their lives and b, have that joy of having people go, oh yeah, I'm feeling like part of this community and I understand this brand now and I like this person because we're on this journey together. There is no greater way to engage people, explain your brand challenge and get social action than an online challenge. There just isn't nothing we have tried.

Yes, my friends, I hope you enjoyed this special episode. Sort of behind the scenes look into my Influencer career. If you enjoy this and you would like to learn more, just get yourself over to influencer magazine.com go ahead and select whether you'd like to come to the live event or to the online training called Influencer Business Program. Both options are there on the page@influencer magazine.com for those wondering what's up, you know, we've been working behind the scenes all year on launching Influencer magazine. It'll be launching late winter with an unbelievable episode. It's gonna be a digital magazine and we're really excited about it because honestly, some of the biggest influencers in the world have just been freaking out once we announced this because our industry really hasn't had a voice and, and it really hasn't had best practices. And honestly it hasn't had a lot of leadership. And for those of you who know my career over the last decade as I used to teach Experts Academy, you know, we had literally millions of people who learned online marketing from me. And as the world's transferred into this time of social media, but also a time in which so many people are on social media and so called influencers, they don't know best practices, they don't know the values of the industry, they don't know how to really build a business that scales. They're just after likes or following or narcissistic stuff instead of really making a difference. So I'm bringing that type of value ethic into the new influencer career by leading the magazine, leading the annual conference, and leading the major online training all into the Influencer brand. And I'd love for you to take part of that, but also get to experience the growth of this industry. You know, it's a billion dollar industry where I mean, every single day, listen, people have the opportunity to follow you, to buy from you, to share your message. And so my question is, why aren't you there more heavily? You know, why don't you share your wisdom, your life experience or even just your passions? Whether you're sharing your stuff or you're curating an experience or a community, there is a way for you to earn income at this, build a real business and a real audience worldwide doing it. You just need the step by step instruction. So go to influencermagazine.com and either join us at the live annual conference again October 10th through 12th in San Diego, or join us in the online training program called Influencer Business Program. We call it that because if you're going to wade in this territory, you should have the ambition to build a real business that allows you to have your lifestyle freedom, that allows you to make your difference that you enjoy, that makes you the money that you need and really impacts people. That's the Influencer Business program which you can again access via going to influencer magazine.com. all right, we'll continue this series. I hope you enjoy this episode. If you do, make sure you share it with four or five friends who are also trying to build their audience or make a difference in the world or who might be interested in these types of learnings that you just listened to. I appreciate you all. I'm so excited to bring you more, more and more insight into sort of behind the scenes of how my industry and my career has worked. I will continue here on these podcasts to share a lot of personal development. This series is just running while we're promoting Influencer 2019, so I hope you'll enjoy it and you'll share these episodes. Make sure you take a screenshot, share it with your friends, give them the link, but also share it and tag me so that I know that you're listening to these episodes and you're getting value from them. Share with me what you liked, what you really learned from so that we can not only recognize and reward you, but but that we can also invite you in. All right, go to influencer magazine.com until next time my friends. Go out there every single day. Remember, you can live fully, you can love openly, and you can make a difference by sharing your voice with the world. Right now.