You're listening to the online marketing made easy podcast episode number 144.

Welcome to the online marketing made easy podcast business advice so easy you'll feel like you're cheating and now your host Amy Porterfield.

Welcome back to another episode of the online marketing made easy podcast. I'm your host Amy Porterfield and today's topic is a hot one.

In 2016 I started to see challenges become even more powerful than the years past. I just started to see people do things with challenges that made a huge impact in their audiences lives as well as their business.

So some of the examples that come to mind the girls at simple green smoothies have been doing challenges to much success. Sarah Janks of live more way less has done challenges for years now and they've only gotten bigger and better.

They're so personal people get really engaged and Jasmine star did a challenge in 2016 for Instagram and I could not believe that she actually got a Facebook group of over 20,000 people just from one challenge.

So I've seen challenges do incredibly well for list building now I guess I need to back up if you're not totally familiar with this idea of challenge it's basically you do seven days or 10 days of challenging your audience to do something every single day and you guide them maybe in a Facebook group or with my video or with email you guide them through the different challenges and inspire them and motivate them to do something because that engagement moves them close to the end of the day.

It moves them closer to wanting to be a customer of yours and actually dive deeper with you now the whole thing for them to get into the challenge is that they first give you their name and email.

So that's why I've seen challenges as a list building effort be incredibly successful now I've never done a challenge before which is probably why I wanted to do this episode today because in 2017 I will definitely be doing some version of a challenge.

And I always like to learn from the masters the people that have gone before me and that's what this episode is all about now I started to follow what my friend Zach Spockler was doing with challenges because not only was he doing challenges in his own business he started to teach others how to do them as well.

Now what makes Zach's approach to challenges unique is that his are not just about this building but also they have a focus on making sales when I saw him make a direct play on selling with his challenges I knew I had to talk to him and I thought well if I want to know what he knows then you guys probably would want to know as well.

Now real quick Zach has been on my show before he was in episode 94 talking about the power of periscope and how he used it to find his audience and also sell his programs now if you don't know Zach here's a little bit about this talented 22 year old shoot me yes he's 22 and under a year Zach bill a six figure business that allowed him to leave graduate school quit his job and become a full time entrepreneur.

These days he coaches and consults with clients who are growing their businesses online specifically when it comes to Facebook ads anything to do with live streaming and creating lucrative online challenges Zach has things dialed in.

So I am really excited to introduce you to his strategy of challenges which specifically are five day challenges that actually lead to sales at the end of the challenge.

So before we get into all the details and I have to tell you I already did this interview with him so I get to record the intro afterward which I always love to do because I have a little bit more insight and at the end of this interview I told Zach I think this was an interview that had zero fluff like there's not one word that you're not going to want to hang on to take some notes and literally put into action.

We did our homework upfront I spent about an hour preparing for this interview he has an amazing blog post where I took a lot of the details to get him to dive in to his challenges so I'll link to his specific blog post at the end as well.

But let me tell you you are in for a treat I loved every minute of this interview now I've teased you enough with how great it's going to be before we get there a quick word from our sponsor.

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Okay let's go ahead and dive in.

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