Do you struggle with keeping your audience
active and engaged with your blog? Are you having trouble attracting new
visitors on a consistent basis?
What you need is a way to awaken your existing
audience while onboarding an abundance of new readers. That’s exactly what a
30-day challenge can do for your blog.
Challenges have a powerful affect on people.
The pressure of a time limit combined with the motivation social interaction
brings can truly light a fire underneath people.
In this post, we’re going to cover everything you need to know about running a 30-day challenge on your blog.
What can you achieve with a
30-day challenge?
The point of a challenge is to engage readers
by encouraging active and dormant followers alike to restore their interest in
your blog. However, running a challenge is one of the hardest and most
demanding projects you can implement on your blog, so what benefits does “engaged
readers” actually translate to?
Traffic is the biggest advantage you’ll
experience, especially when you run challenges that last longer than seven
days. Promotion must begin before your challenge even starts, and you’ll
receive buzz across social media and other platforms throughout the challenge.
You’ll receive more social shares as a result,
and the influx of traffic will lead to more email sign ups and sales for
products related to your challenge.
As your challenge plays on, you’ll find yourself with a larger network as you cross promote blog posts, podcast episodes, products and followings with other influencers in your niche.
You may also find yourself more productive,
especially if you’re taking part in the challenge alongside your audience.
Stage 1: Pick a challenge
There’s a lot of variety of in the world of
30-day challenges, and yes, there are enough of them to create their own world.
There’s the Inktober challenge where artists create one ink-based drawing or illustration for every day of October. There’s also NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, where authors all around the world attempt to write 50,000-word manuscripts in the month of November.
Nathalie Lussier runs a 30-day list building challenge you can start at any time of the year. While the challenge doesn’t have a specific numeric goal, it is designed to help you earn more email subscribers over the course of a month.
There are also countless fitness challenges.
No matter how different these challenges are, one thing is certain: they all work toward solving specific problems members of their respective niches are having. Refer to Blogging Wizard’s guide on how to find your audience’s pain points to come up with a focus for your challenge.
Go through the guide to discover your
audience’s biggest pain points. You should also consider the struggles you’re
having or have had. Some bloggers create challenges to motivate themselves into
achieving goals they’re struggling to reach.
Are there any goals you haven’t been meeting?
Have you accomplished anything noteworthy? Jot them down.
Once you have a list of problems related to
your niche, come up with solutions (written as brief summaries) for each of
them. Think of the transformation you want your reader to have by the end of
the challenge. Then, break those solutions down into the steps your reader will
need to take to achieve them.
Cut your list down to pain points/solutions
whose steps you feel you can stretch out over 30 days. Each step can take one
day, two days, three days, etc. You don’t need to restrict yourself or your
reader to one step per day.
It’s just a matter of choosing the challenge
that excites you most after that.
Stage 2: Plan your 30-day
challenge
The challenges I listed above vary, both in
the types of goals they target as well as how they’re implemented.
Inktober wants you to create one piece of
artwork per day while NaNoWriMo wants you to write 50,000 words between
November 1 and November 30 with no strict guidelines on how many words you
should write each day.
While these challenges may help you be more
productive than you typically are, they’re not designed to guide you through
the process. You don’t learn anything new nor do you discover tips, tricks and
techniques you can carry with you long after the challenge ends.
It’s better to break your challenge, or rather
your solution, down into tasks your reader can complete over the course of 30
days. That is the first pillar of a 30-day challenge.
Creating phases for your
challenge
Consider the steps you wrote down for your
solution earlier. Feel free to organize these steps into three phrases (where
each phase lasts ~10 days). You don’t have to, but it can make planning easier
on yourself.
Let’s use a blogging-related challenge as an
example. Let’s say you have an email list for your blog, but it’s only a basic
list and you have low open and click-through rates.
A great solution to this problem would be to
segment your email list as a way to target the diverse sections within your
audience and ensure your emails are only sent to the individuals who would be
most interested in them.
So, here’s what I have so far:
- Problem – Reader has a decent-sized email list
that’s growing steadily, but their subscribers are not opening their emails.
The ones that do open their emails
are not clicking the links within them. - Solution – Create three to five segments that
define subscribers based on their interests, their experience and the actions
they take.
I’ve written down steps the reader should take to create a segmented email list with Milanote. You can just as easily use Coggle, Mindmeister, your preferred mind-mapping tool or a word processor.
Now, I can organize these steps into three
phrases. On your end, use your mind-mapping tool to color code each step based
on which phase it should fall under.
The phases in my example challenge use the
following structures:
- Phase 1: Preparation – Tasks the reader should
do before they create their segments to maximize their success as well as to
determine what their segments should be. - Phase 2: Development – Tasks the reader should
perform to create segments in their email marketing service applications. - Phase 3: Implementation – Tasks that fully
implement the reader’s segments well enough to segment new and existing
subscribers alike.
Planning tasks for your challenge
Next, break down your phases or steps (if you
didn’t create phases) into tasks. Each task will represent one blog post or
piece of content. They should each have a clear focus and be actionable enough
for your reader to reach a new milestone toward the challenge’s primary
objective.
So, I’ll break down my “Pre-Optimization Tips”
step into two tasks based on the way the topics I want to cover in that step
can be organized. One task will cover autoresponders while the other will
feature tips on how to write better emails.
Go down your own list, and break each step
down into actionable tasks.
Creating content for your
challenge
The second pillar of a 30-day challenge is
content, and it’s definitely what will take the longest to prepare out of this
whole process. The first thing you need to do is determine the types of content
you’d like to feature in your challenge, at least for the tasks.
You can work exclusively within the realms of
your blog, create audio content in the form of podcast episodes, publish videos
or use a combination of all three. Audio quality is extremely important for
podcasts and video content, so be sure to skip this type of content for now if
you don’t have the time to learn a new medium.
Next, go through each task one by one, and
determine the best type of content to use for each. You can even create
multiple types of content for each task to give readers the option of choosing
formats most suitable to the ways they learn.
Just make sure you’re being realistic about
how much content you’re willing or are able to produce in the timeframe you
give yourself to prepare for your challenge.
The next part involves creating the content
for your challenge once you determine which type you’d like to use for each
task. This will likely eat up most of your time during the preparation process.
Lastly, use existing content where possible to
reduce the amount you need to produce.
As a side note, you should come up with and
create lead magnets for each post to maximize the number of email sign ups you
receive throughout the challenge as well as to make things more interactive for
your audience.
Stage 3: Implement your challenge
Once you’re done creating content for your
challenge, it’s time to get to work on launching it. This involves the third
and fourth pillars—promotion and distribution.
If you try to promote the challenge on social
media, your blog and your email list after
it launches, you’re only setting yourself up for failure. You need to generate
buzz online and within your audience well before the challenge starts.
Doing this also gives you the chance to
connect with other bloggers so you can cross promote and maximize your success.
Finally, the distribution stage is where
you’ll actually launch the challenge.
Promotion
As I said, in order for your challenge to have
as much success as possible, you must promote it inside and outside of your audience.
Here are a few ways you can promote it
directly to the audience you’ve already built:
- Blog – Start teasing the challenge in your most recent blog posts, and dedicate an entire post announcing and explaining your challenge.
- Email List – Approach this in the same way by teasing the challenge in emails and dedicating one email to its announcement.
- Social Media – Create promotional images, and come up with a hashtag as you tease and announce the challenge to your following on various social media platforms.
- Podcast – Same as your blog, but you’ll tease the challenge in your most recent episodes instead, then release a shorter bonus episode dedicated to its announcement.
Here are ways you can promote your challenge
outside of your audience:
- Network – Reach out to other influencers in
your niche to see if they’d be willing to collaborate with you on this
challenge, either by doing the challenge with you or offering discounts on
products related to it. Offer discounts of your own as incentives to cross
promote. - Guest Post/Host – Think of this as a digital
press tour, only you’ll be promoting your challenge instead of a book or
product. Write guest posts related to your challenge and guest host on other
podcasts, being sure to choose blogs and podcasts related to your niche to
maximize your potential. - Advertise – Buy ad space on Google, Facebook,
Instagram and YouTube to reach a wider audience.
No matter how many of these promotion tactics you use, you must create a landing page with an opt-in form to collect new and existing subscribers interested in your challenge. You can even create a tag in your email marketing service application called “Interest: 30-Day Challenge.” This will allow you to send targeted content before and after the challenge.
Distribution
Once you launch the challenge, ensure there’s
at least one day between each task/piece of content you distribute to your
audience. Some of your readers lead busy lives, and you don’t want them falling
behind as a result.
Fill in the gaps with updates on social media, YouTube, your email list and livestreams. You can even feature progress from your readers if you aren’t partaking in the challenge yourself.
In general, most of the tactics we talk about in our article on ‘how to promote your blog‘ can be used for your 30-day challenge.
Final thoughts
It’s hard to predict the fallout of a 30-day
challenge. You’ll see a high amount of engagement before and throughout, but
there’s no telling how long that will last once the challenge’s runtime is up.
When it comes to the content you publish afterward, it’s best to stick to topics loosely related to your challenge. For our challenge on optimizing your email list, we could publish reviews on various email marketing software tools, a tutorial on how to build a highly optimized landing page, case studies from subscribers and more.
The idea is to hold the attention of the
audience you’ve built by publishing resourceful content that’ll help them even
after the challenge is over.
Be sure to check out our guide on how to boost engagement on your blog if you need more help in this area.
