SPI 906: Easy Rules for Crafting Challenges That Convert

SPI 906: Easy Rules for Crafting Challenges That Convert

Pat Flynn: For the last several years, I’ve talked about building community and why community is important. Not just because we have one here at SPI and one that you could join and be a part of, and people have been getting wins and results and all those great things that come along with it. But community is important because this is a way to future proof your brand, to engage those who are following you and help people climb that pyramid of fandom, right?

People start out at the bottom, where they become a casual audience member. They follow you. They’re kind of feeling lonely while they follow your brand. They don’t kind of think of themselves as lonely, but they don’t see a community there. They’re not feeling like they’re a part of something.

They’re coming into your space, your content, watching your videos, whatever it might be, to collect something, and then they move on. We want to bring them into a community so that they can feel A sense of belonging so that they could feel like they’re getting paid attention to, so that they could feel like they are making progress on whatever their goals might be.

Ideally, just so that they don’t feel like they’re alone. And when it comes to creation as a creator online, it’s important to not just talk, talk, talk, talk, and tell people what to do exactly. You need to motivate them and not only do you need to motivate them, you need to get them to move, to actually do something, to get results.

And that can be very difficult. A lot of times we don’t see any movement from our audience because what we’re asking them to do feels so big or feels so grand, right? This is why When we’ve started talking about business, it’s like, hey, let us help you start your business. That is such a big thing to think about and wrap your head around.

And immediately, people start, when they think about this big thing that they’re trying to wrap their head around, they start immediately going into reasons why they cannot do that thing. Well, I don’t have enough money to start a business. Well, I don’t have enough time. I’ve tried it before and it doesn’t work.

You start coming up with all these different stories. And this big thing just becomes a big magnet of false stories based on previous beliefs or limiting beliefs or previous experiences. Rather, we need to focus on getting people to move on something a lot smaller, right? The power of a quick win. And this is where the idea of building and creating a challenge for your audience is really important. A challenge can do all of the above. Motivate, inspire, get people to move and see results, and make people feel like they are a part of a community. But not only that, it allows people to experience that rather small win, relatively speaking, to then open themselves up to the bigger things that you might have to offer, the bigger tasks that can help them go from that first step in the challenge to the next steps and further down the road with you and hopefully one day joining your community as a member or participating in your upcoming cohort based course or program or perhaps hiring you as a consultant because you’ve already got them some you results.

In 2013, 2014, kind of, 10 plus years ago, I ran my first public challenge, and this was run on the SPI blog.

And at the time, all the rage, and I still think it’s very important, although it’s not all the rage quote unquote anymore, is email building an email list. And a lot of people were having trouble getting started and couldn’t wrap their head around the idea of building an email list, especially when people started talking about numbers in the thousands, tens of thousands, writing emails, getting data from that many people on your list.

No, I’m just starting out. How do I get started with this? And of course, I wrote blog posts and I had podcast episodes helping people get started. I had a course, I had all the information people could ever need to succeed with email marketing. By the way, those materials are still available for members of our community.

Look up Email Marketing Magic if you are in the SPI community. Of course, you have access to all of our courses in there, and that’s the one I’m talking about. But even then, even though people had access to all that they needed, people were still having trouble getting started.

They felt lonely in the process, and so I decided to, around this time, start a challenge. And this challenge was called the 0 to 100 email challenge. It was a 72 hour challenge, a three day challenge, to help people go from zero emails on their email list to exactly 100. And in that first go around, from how dormant people were with getting access to and reading my material, listening to the podcast episodes, and actually taking action on starting an email list, As dormant as people were, 15,000 people participated in this challenge that had a start date, it had an associated Facebook group to go along with it, there were daily posts in those three days to help people learn how to finally get their email list going.

And many people, in fact, most people who took that challenge succeeded. They saw more emails than they ever had before. Many people not just getting to a hundred emails, but some even getting to over 1,000 emails in a three day period just simply because they had simple instructions, took action, they had a time period to do it within, and they were doing it alongside other people.

That’s it. And so, what I want to do is encourage you to think about a challenge that you can have your audience and your followers participate in the beginning of 2026. Last week in our episode that kind of dove into the idea of short form content, the best opportunity there is for you right now to grow quickly online is with short form content and the upcoming challenge that we have to help you do that starting on January 12th.

In fact, I have a URL for you now, a website. If you go to 30Videos.com, you’ll see there exactly how you can get involved and get started with that and get and download some information beforehand before the actual challenge begins, because starting on January 12th, members of the community who have access to this, the people who are publicly going through this challenge, are all going to be creating daily videos together for 30 days.

And I want you to start thinking about a challenge that you could offer your community. It could be a 24 hour challenge, it doesn’t have to be 30 days, it’s important for short form in that context to be 30 days, which is why it’s daily for 30 days, and 30Videos.com once again. But it might be a 24 hour challenge, a 48 hour challenge, 72 hour challenge, a 7 day challenge, whatever it might be that relates to an easy step that your audience can take to start their journey to help them get a result.

You might wanna reverse engineer what that result might be. That could be a nice quick win for them to start with and turn that then into a challenge. And in this particular podcast episode today, I wanna share with you why challenges work, go into the psychology of it a bit.

I wanna share with you some rules related to challenges that you should be thinking about before you create your challenge and announce it and make it public. We’re going to go into some of the mechanics and operations of it as well, and then what to do after the challenge, because the truth is, after the challenge is the most powerful part of this process.

It’s something that allows you to then, in a way, permission to help move people into the next steps with you, whether that’s another free step or a paid step or whatever it might be. But today, we’re diving into the challenges and why they’re powerful for creators and their audiences and how you can use them to spark action, build trust, and grow your brand. The most engaged communities are the ones that seem to always have some sort of challenge going on. And when you think about it, as a participant, as a member of these communities, whether it’s an enclosed community like what we have at Circle, or in a Facebook group, LinkedIn group, or it’s more public, like what we’re doing with this upcoming 30 day challenge, because it will be a public challenge.

We want as many people participating as possible. Let’s talk about the psychology of it. Action breeds belief. Action breeds belief. You can talk all you want about how great things are when people take action and do things, you can get people to hear about all the fun stories of success and things that you have gone through yourself, success stories of your own students and your own colleagues, but when a person experiences what it’s like to take action themselves and they start to see those results, even if they’re small, they start to believe in themselves and you.

And that’s when the magic happens. during the 100 emails challenge, which actually you could still see at 100emails.com, the landing page for it. Again, we’ll talk about the mechanics of this and whether you need a landing page and all those kinds of things. We’ll talk about that as we go through, because I want to help make this easy for you.

But with the 100 emails challenge, a lot of people found success who didn’t hit 100 emails, because it wasn’t about actually hitting 100 emails. 100 was just the psychology of something small and achievable, that people could be like, yeah, I think I could do that and I could give it three days. If it doesn’t work, then I don’t lose anything.

Well, like I said, some people got to a hundred, many did. Some got to even a thousand plus, but many people had emails in the 20 and 30s and 50s. And even just a dozen. And those people still felt it was valuable and successful for them because, again, with those emails you could do some powerful things as far as next steps.

Learning about who those people are, understanding what content to create next, using those emails as survey opportunities. And so people, even though they didn’t get to 100, because they took action, because they saw some small result, they started to believe. Many of those people became members of our community.

They enrolled in our courses and have done very well for themselves. Those small achievable steps build confidence. When you break down a challenge into the daily challenge and maybe even hourly within that, you start to see some people actually being able to grasp the idea of doing this and then actually seeing it through themselves.

Because those micro wins, again, build momentum and psychologically and even biologically we have a part of our brain, the reptilian part of our brain, that when we see something that we like, when there’s a reward that happens as a result of an action, that part of the brain fires up and continues to go back to get more.

And that is what we can offer by breaking down these bigger goals into smaller challenges and breaking down these small challenges into micro win opportunities. The other component of this that was really important, because we did actually automate the 100 emails challenge, it is something that is delivered via email, and it is something that can be happening at all times, in fact, there are hundreds of people going through it right now, probably, at this very moment, who signed up for it, within three days from the recording that I’m doing right now.

And there will be people who sign up tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. However, there was one thing in the beginning that brought in 15,000 people doing this all at the same time. A huge wave of motivation. A huge wave of success. A huge wave of people joining our email list. And a huge number of people clicking on our affiliate link for Kit.

And then later down the road, of course, the course came. I wish the course was available back then, but it wasn’t, but that’s okay. People still filter through and join because of the email marketing magic course, but nonetheless. That first go was huge, not just because this was a new thing, but because we were all in it together.

The three day period had a sense of community and accountability. Challenges, when done in a public manner or when it’s done in a cohort or group type way, manner, it can create a sense that we’re kind of all in this together, right? Which increases motivation and follow through. It’s exactly why it’s so much easier to go to the gym when you go with a bunch of friends every morning or however often you go versus just doing it on your own.

The community and the accountability go a very long way. There’s social proof connected to this as well. Social proof is when people see other people doing something, they want to then join in. So there is a portion of social proof that matters for the sign up process. Hey, join this challenge. It’s happening now.

We have hundreds of people already signed up to collect and get these emails. We have X number of people starting on this date. Come join. Don’t miss out, right? It inspires people to participate. But there’s social proof even within the challenge, after it begins, because there’s proof in people also taking action.

Nobody wants to be first, but if they see other people doing it, they’re going to want to do it as well. And especially if they start to see other people succeeding, and to see how easy this is, and to get some help and accountability, again, from the other people that are in there. When people share their progress, it inspires others and creates a viral effect.

Because then those people get started. They share their process. and progress and it just continues to be this incredible flywheel and then you can take some of those results and make them public for the next challenge which will then bring more people in which will then bring this viral effect of people sharing their progress the next go around for the people inside which will then get more results for people on the outside boom, flywheel. And that commitment and that consistency within that time period is important.

Right, the idea that there’s a date that we’re going to commit to do this and an end date where it ends. And that’s why a lot of people don’t take action. They’re curious about how long this will take or they don’t know what to expect or how to measure results and success. This is again where the idea of committing to a challenge that starts on a particular date and ends on a particular date and has a particular and very specific hope and results tied to it.

Then it’s great. Then it’s going to be more likely to work. People are more likely to take action, and therefore, more likely to believe in themselves, and you. There’s a lot going on in the brain when it comes to the idea of a challenge. You need to use a challenge. I want you, and I want to encourage you, to think about how you might challenge your audience, and really get them involved.

Don’t just, like, Say it at the end of a podcast. Hey, okay. Thanks for listening to this podcast. I challenge you to go out there today and make somebody’s day. That’s what I want to challenge you to do. That’s not that specific. It’s not specific in date. It’s not specific in action. I want you to get specific.

Why? Because with the idea of a challenge. You can generate leads. Free challenges are a very low barrier entry way to get new people into your ecosystem, into your world. This upcoming challenge, people are already buzzing about it. People are already wanting to sign up again. 30 videos, the number 30Videos.com.

And this is a great way for you to join our email list and participate in what we have to offer and how we offer it and hopefully get a taste of something that you maybe want to see more of. Or at least, at the very least, You exit with the idea that you’ve gotten something that you didn’t before, and the next time somebody asks you, Hey, how did you get started with this?

How did you begin your video success? Oh, it was Pat’s video challenge. His 30 day video challenge. Yeah, 30videos.com. Yeah, yeah, that’s it. You see how easy this could work, even for people who don’t necessarily participate in things after? It becomes a memorable moment because we’ve gotten a result for you, or at least that’s the idea.

A challenge can help you build trust and authority, right? You prove your methods that work. You prove that they work by helping people get real results in a relatively fast period of time. So that trust and authority, that’s, you know, technology changes every single day. And every single year we see new systems, new platforms, new technologies arise and fall.

And no matter what, it’s trust and authority on those platforms, with those systems, with that technology that will always, always have to be there in order for you to succeed as a business owner in one way, shape, or form. Building trust and creating authority with challenges is a wonderful way to do it because you’re serving your audience at the same time while being sort of the person who can help them get there.

Pre selling, right? Challenges give people a taste of your teaching style and your community before they invest in your paid offers. And this is very clearly something that many entrepreneurs want. They want sales. They want to be successful. People that join their courses, their cohorts, their communities, but they’re just doing cold email campaigns.

They’re just doing cold email outreach. They’re doing a public more content piece and then hoping some of those people will be interested enough to trust that what they have to offer will help them. Or you can get people some results first, prove yourself, and be more likely to get a yes when you ask.

This is what a challenge can do. It can kind of pre sell. It primes your audience for what is to come, in a bigger sense, after. And it’s a content engine as well. Challenges are an incredible content engine. With UGC, have you ever heard of UGC? That’s user generated content. There are testimonials that can come from this, stories from the challenge, that can fuel not just more people joining your challenges, Just your brand in general, right?

The stories that you can collect that you can bring on your podcast now, the stories that you can collect that you can then use to market the things that you have to offer. So let’s talk about the rules of a great challenge. First of all, rule number one, make it possible. The challenge should feel achievable for a beginner.

Avoid anything that might seem overwhelming or something that doesn’t seem possible. You want to bring it in to simplicity. And this is why it was 0 to 100 emails. Now we have the 30 videos challenge, the 30 day video challenge. And yes, that might seem a little bit more difficult, but it’s just 30 videos per day, and the way we teach it is it’s going to be simple videos, right?

Just a particular framework that you can kind of repeat for x number of days. And it needed to be 30 days. Because you need that many days of data, that many reps to start to get to a point where you can start to see some success specifically with short form video. 30 days is kind of maximum when it comes to a challenge and how long because many people are gonna drop off, which is why hopefully you have some retention tactics, ways to remotivate people in the middle of the process.

The longer the challenge, the more likely you are to need that in order to keep people going all the way through. But either way, people can imagine doing a quick video per day for 30 days, and you want to make it possible for them to achieve that. Right? Imagine I said, get to 100,000 emails. People are immediately going to believe that that’s not going to happen, or that it’s not meant for them, or it’s impossible, and so they’re not even going to participate or even try.

They’re out. Same thing if we said, get to a million followers on Instagram and YouTube with this short form challenge. No, first of all, that’s not going to happen to most people. It will happen to some. Likely, who participate in this challenge. A, you can’t guarantee that, but what can you control? You can control people getting more views, building a bigger audience than they ever have before with short form video.

That’s something that will happen if you stay and remain consistent, and so that’s what we can show up for. So rule one, make it possible. Rule two, keep it free, or nearly free. Right, a person’s gonna need a phone, I would recommend a phone, to do your 30 day challenge. If we had said with our 100 emails challenge, hey, you have to get this email service provider and pay for it first.

People are already out. They don’t know that it’s worth investing in that because they haven’t gotten a taste of what it’s like to do the thing that that thing that you can invest in will do for you. So keep it as free as possible. Remove financial barriers. This is why you didn’t need an email service provider to go through the three day challenge, the 72 hour email challenge.

You just needed a pen and paper and a spreadsheet. That’s it. The goal is participation, not profit. Profit can come later, indirectly, as people enter your ecosystem and see what you have to offer, and most importantly, having gotten results first. So, keep it free. Rule number one, make it possible. Rule number two, keep it free.

Rule number three, remove hurdles, right? Not just expensive tools, or complicated tech, even free tech. If it’s hard to do, then it’s not going to work, right? Remove any need for any real special skills, right? The biggest hurdle for the video challenge is going to be editing, which is why the idea is try not to even have to edit at all, if possible.

Right? There are videos and people who tell great stories who have a repeatable framework who don’t have to edit. They can literally just have to do it in one take or small little edits, slicing, dicing on their app. And that’s it. And I already foresee that that’s going to be the biggest problem for the people going through the 30 video challenge.

But what’s cool is that by forcing you to do this every day, you cannot overthink this. You do not have the time to over edit and over analyze, you just need to get it out there. So it actually, the daily ness of it, is a way to get you to actually not edit as much, and to get through, to hit record and then publish daily.

Okay, anyway, that’s rule number three. Remove hurdles. Make it easy. As easy as possible. Rule number four. In the teaching portion of this, keep the steps clear and simple. It should be the easiest to read and understand or watch if you’re watching videos in this challenge. Use ChatGPT if you need to. Take whatever paragraphs you have to instruct people and say, hey, ChatGPT, take these paragraphs and make it simpler to understand.

In fact, break it down into a step by step process for me. Whatever you need to do, make it clear and simple. Rule number five. Visible progress. Participants should be able to see and share their progress. It’s so much easier to do a challenge when there is something trackable. This is where a lot of people, especially in the mindset space, kind of struggle.

They’re like, okay, 30 days to be happy or to be stress free, but how do you measure that? Right? I have seen some brands do this very well in that realm. They literally, at the end of each day, have the participants fill out a report. And in that report, they actually have to quantify how they feel, for example, which then gives a number to how they were compared to the days before and overall a number at the end of the challenge and hopefully tracking in the right direction.

But even then that is seemingly a little complicated and a lot of steps. And again, the more that you could simplify this, the better. 30 days of video. Great. You’ll know whether you win because you’ll either have done a number of videos or not. Right, you could track how many videos you publish, and the nice thing about that is that’s what you can control.

You can’t necessarily control the views, right, if this was a 100,000 view challenge, that would be very difficult, although still trackable. Very, very hard to understand whether that will happen or not. There will be some people, again, who will get that as a byproduct. And again, the idea being, just create.

Because if we focus on the views, you’re going to get down on yourself when you don’t hit a video that has a lot of views. You’re going to ask yourself, why am I doing this? You’re not doing this to get the views. You’re doing this to get to 30 days, and as a byproduct of that, the views that are meant to come will come.

You’ll see some videos that do better than others. Great, let’s lean into that. Let’s not do the other videos that kind of bomb. Let’s work on your hooks, etc. There’s a lot of things to do there. So number five is visible progress. You want visible progress. You want a way to check in every single day and see how people are doing.

Rule number six, use a community. I would recommend using some sort of community. It could even be as simple as just your Facebook group. Or, you an Instagram post every single day where your community shows up and leaves a comment saying they did the job. In fact, that’s how we’re going to run this one coming up.

You want to allow for people to see that there are other people doing it alongside them. If you have the opportunity for them to connect with one another, great. This is where social media thrives with threads and connections and replies and those kinds of things. At a minimum, that’s great enough.

Try to bring a sense of community and people seeing that others are doing it alongside them. Social media is great for that, but a Circle community, a Facebook group. Again, don’t overcomplicate this. If you already have a community, do it there. And then rule number seven, very important. The last rule here.

So we started with make it possible. Number two is keep it free or nearly free. Number three, remove hurdles. Number four, clear and simple steps. Rule number five, visible progress. Rule number six, community and accountability. Rule number seven, very important, celebrate wins. Publicly, during the challenge, after the challenge especially, recognize participants progress and their completion.

Hey, great job to Joan who had seven days in a row of video, and one of those videos saw over a thousand views. Amazing, Joan. Keep it up. Let’s go for 14. Two weeks straight. Let’s do this. Recognize participants progress and their completion publicly or within the group that you’re doing this effort. So that’s rule number seven.

Celebrate the wins. So here is kind of more technically what you need to do to launch your own challenge, right? Number one, pick a simple, high impact action related to your niche. Get your first 100 emails. Create videos for 30 days. You know exactly what the goal is and what you’re trying to attempt to do.

Set a clear time frame. 72 hours, 48 hours, 7, 14 days. One week challenge, 30 days. Then you could use a page like a landing page from Kit, which you can freely create if you sign up for Kit, SmartPassiveIncome.com/Kit. What you’ll need is some sort of landing page, a page that you could drive people to, to sign up for this.

Right? This is what brings people to your email list. There are many ways to do this. We are going to be experimenting with ManyChat inside of Instagram to get people on our list through social media. So we’ll be hearing more about ManyChat in the near future, because, man, it’s a powerful tool for social media.

So, on that landing page, you want people to sign up. When they sign up, you want to be able to send them some information about when this all goes down, what to expect, what are the kinds of things they’re going to have to do, and just encourage people. And then on the day that it begins It begins and you share the information they need to start to take that action, right?

You could set those things up ahead of time, like daily prompts or reminders via email, social. Write these things out ahead of time if you can, so you’re not creating them on the fly. You can edit them sort of on the fly before you hit publish or broadcast, but having them available allows it so you’re not scrambling and the challenge doesn’t drop off.

You have already thought this through. Again, build that community space if you need to. Facebook group, maybe it’s a Discord or a Slack channel, hashtag even. And then plan how you’re going to celebrate and showcase your participants who have gone through this and have completed it and have gotten some wins, right?

Bring them on your podcast, talk about them in follow ups, and send emails about them, and then think about what the next step is going to be. This is the power of the challenge, is thinking about the challenge is step one. What might I be able to offer for step two? How might I be able to encourage people to move on to the next thing, and then the next thing after that?

It starts with a challenge, but what might step two be? Maybe it’s actually purchasing a software that would help them do this thing that they did more manually up front, which is exactly what we did. Offered Kit as an affiliate for people who participated in the 100 emails challenge, because they were doing that more manually.

They were keeping track of those emails manually. And if you want to send these emails out in a more broadcast kind of manner, plus create an autoresponder and have these things all done for you, get the affiliate, go through the link and we earn a commission through that. So there might be some tools or things that you can offer.

You might have your own things to offer. You might want to book a call if you’re getting people to consult or coach with you, et cetera. So here is the big thing. Before we finish up. You know, again, I wanted to make this simple for you. Number one, I want you to think about a challenge using all those sort of things that we just talked about in mind.

Keep those things in mind, especially with keeping this simple. What might a challenge be for you and your audience in Q1 of 2026? For us, it’s a 30 day video challenge. 30videos.com, go there, because we’re going to kick that off on January 12th. You’re listening to this after, you could probably still go to 30videos.com because this is a challenge that I want to continue to run again and again, so long as I know that short form video is a leading method and strategy for building an audience, getting people to come find you, and then getting people to get interested in what you have. So, 30videos.com. Go there, sign up, and get ready to start.

All the things that you’re going to need to know happen right after you sign up there. Again, so much, and go figure out what the challenge is for your crew. That’s your call to action in this episode. I thought about creating a challenge challenge. Here’s a challenge to create a challenge for your community.

But that would have been too confusing and I’m just telling you now. Start thinking about it now and get those things in motion because when your audience takes that action and motion happens, they’re gonna want to come back to you because they’ll start to trust you. It’s getting them those results.

Thank you so much, I appreciate you, and hit that subscribe button, because we’re coming up to the end of the year, we’re in the 900s now, people, and we’re approaching episode 1000 very soon in the next year or two here, so make sure you subscribe so you can catch that, and all the great things that we have coming your way.

See you soon.