post

<p>Creators love a challenge. It’s something you gravitate to.</p>
<p>Maybe because as creators you’re constantly looking for new ways to keep learning and bettering yourself. And we love being a part of that journey with our <a href="https://convertkit.com/challenge/grow-your-audience" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Grow Your Audience Challenge</a>.</p>
<p>The Grow Your Audience Challenge (previously called the Landing Page Challenge) is our trademark challenge. We invite creators of all stages from different industries and backgrounds to work toward the goal of building their audience for 30 days.</p>
<p>Because growing an audience is the foundation for every creator, we specifically dialed into creating this challenge.. And—it’s by far one of the most common questions.</p>
<h2 id="chapter-1">Why creators should join the Grow Your Audience challenge</h2>
<p>Having an audience gives you the reassurance that your work is impactful, the confidence to explore different content channels, and the opportunity to develop your passion into a business. Some start by creating a following on social media, some do it through streaming platforms, but no matter how you start, at some point, you always end up needing (and wanting!) to <a href="https://convertkit.com/features/email-marketing" target="_blank" rel="noopener">build an email list</a>.</p>
<p>Whether you&#8217;re a brand new beginner starting from scratch or you already have a following on social media, our Grow Your Audience Challenge can help you build an email list and grow your audience in 30 days.</p>
<h2 id="chapter-2">How the Grow Your Audience challenge worked</h2>
<p>After years of working with thousands of creators and being creators ourselves, we put together a <strong>free challenge</strong> just to answer this question for you: <em>How do I grow my audience?</em></p>
<p>The tl;dr? We think a landing page is one of the best ways to grow your audience.</p>
<p>The challenge gave participants the <a href="https://convertkit.com/blog" target="_blank" rel="noopener">resources</a> needed to learn how to build and use a <a href="https://convertkit.com/features/landing-pages" target="_blank" rel="noopener">landing page</a> to gain new subscribers and how to implement other list building strategies—all with ConvertKit.</p>
<h3>Milestones</h3>
<p><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-39179 lazy" data-src="https://media.convertkit.com/post/aDHQXXmS-GYAC-2021-recap-milestones.jpg?fm=pjpg" alt="grow your audience challenge" width="1500" height="941" /></p>
<p>To start, we broke down the goal of growing an email list into smaller, manageable milestones. This gave our creators a reason to celebrate as they built their list, reduced burnout, and helped them adjust their strategy as needed. After all, getting your first 10 subscribers can look very different from getting the next 1,000 subscribers.</p>
<h3>Weekly accountability emails</h3>
<p>Who doesn’t need a little bit of accountability? We all do. It keeps our to-do tasks organized and pushes us to work down the list.</p>
<p>Every week in the challenge we sent out an accountability email that gave participants clear goals and tasks to accomplish that week. In addition, we include all the supporting resources they might need to strategize as well as demos to help them set up their landing pages and emails.</p>
<h3>Workshops, product demos, and live Q&amp;As</h3>
<p><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-39178 lazy" data-src="https://media.convertkit.com/post/vGjpRhZR-GYAC-2021-recap-workshop.jpg?fm=pjpg" alt="grow your audience challenge" width="1500" height="861" /></p>
<p>To keep everything in an easy to find spot, we built a challenge hub of resources that included pre-recorded workshops, product demos, and live Q&amp;As with our in-house creator educator Angel Marie. Here are the workshops participants got access to <em>only</em> through participating in our challenge.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Workshop #1: The strategies top creators use to build high-converting landing pages</strong>. Creating a landing page that grows your email list starts with the work you do before you make the landing page. This workshop sets the foundation for how you scale your email list.</li>
<li><strong>Workshop #2: How to create and share your landing page in less than 24 hours</strong>. Creating a landing page doesn’t take as long as you think it might, especially with ConvertKit. This workshop walks through must-haves you should include in your landing page and gives you a demo of how you can do full customizations.</li>
<li><strong>Workshop #3: 20 ways to grow your list with a landing page</strong>. Once you have a landing page, how do you <em>actually</em> grow your list? This workshop breaks down list-building strategies you can implement to grow an email list of fans and buyers.</li>
<li><strong>Workshop #4: How to set your future sales up for success.</strong> As you grow your audience, you want to build trust with them, too. Nurturing your list helps them get familiarized with your content and future products or services. We give you additional tips on how to write the kinds of emails that both generate an impact and lead to sales in your business.</li>
</ul>
<p>These pre-recorded workshops are great because they can be watched on your own time.</p>
<p>But it’s also important to get the live coaching to help answer any questions that might come up. Every week we hosted 1-hour long live Q&amp;As with challenge participants. We answered over 100 questions live.</p>
<h3>Community group</h3>
<p><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-39177 lazy" data-src="https://media.convertkit.com/post/RkyOWxcr-GYAC-2021-recap-community.jpg?fm=pjpg" alt="grow your audience challenge" width="1500" height="987" /></p>
<p>Last and certainly not the least, challenge participants got to be a part of our <a href="https://community.convertkit.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ConvertKit community</a>. We hosted a challenge specific group where everyone was working toward the same goal. We saw so many connections made by creators reaching out to other creators to share tips, advice, and wins!</p>
<h2 id="chapter-3">Creators growing their audience</h2>
<p>Our Grow Your Audience challenge attracts more than 10,000 creators every time we open up registration. Of those creators, we have beginners who set up their marketing hub and foundational content to capture their first email subscriber. On the other spectrum, we have professional creators scaling their business. In total, participants from this most recent challenge gained a collective 37,069 new subscribers in just 30 days.</p>
<p><img class="aligncenter wp-image-39176 size-medium lazy" data-src="https://media.convertkit.com/post/FI2uQto0-GYAC-2021-recap-pie-chart.jpg?fit=scale&fm=pjpg&h=381&w=600" alt="grow your audience challenge" width="600" height="381" srcset="https://media.convertkit.com/post/FI2uQto0-GYAC-2021-recap-pie-chart.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=381&amp;w=600 600w, https://media.convertkit.com/post/FI2uQto0-GYAC-2021-recap-pie-chart.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=651&amp;w=1024 1024w, https://media.convertkit.com/post/FI2uQto0-GYAC-2021-recap-pie-chart.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=488&amp;w=768 768w, https://media.convertkit.com/post/FI2uQto0-GYAC-2021-recap-pie-chart.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=375&amp;w=590 590w, https://media.convertkit.com/post/FI2uQto0-GYAC-2021-recap-pie-chart.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=240&amp;w=378 378w, https://media.convertkit.com/post/FI2uQto0-GYAC-2021-recap-pie-chart.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=976&amp;w=1536 1536w, https://media.convertkit.com/post/FI2uQto0-GYAC-2021-recap-pie-chart.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=1301&amp;w=2048 2048w, https://media.convertkit.com/post/FI2uQto0-GYAC-2021-recap-pie-chart.jpg?fm=pjpg 1500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /></p>
<p>What strategies did these creators implement during the challenge? Let’s take a look at some of the most popular (and successful!) <a href="https://convertkit.com/landing-page-templates" target="_blank" rel="noopener">landing pages</a> we’ve seen creators build.</p>
<h3>Challenges</h3>
<p><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-39175 lazy" data-src="https://media.convertkit.com/post/anGBkt9E-GYAC-2021-recap-wfh-landing-page.jpg?fm=pjpg" alt="grow your audience challenge" width="1500" height="982" /></p>
<p>Like we said, creators love a challenge! Plus, there are so many other benefits in running a challenge—it’s a great teaching tool, it fosters an engaged community, and most importantly, it gives new subscribers a taste of what you offer. Here are some examples:</p>
<ul>
<li>Dr. Katie Clare is a chiropractic sports physician who created a landing page to promote their seven-day posture and mobility challenge. <a href="https://dr-katie-clare.ck.page/a0bd53a134" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Check it out here.</a></li>
<li>Kate Hesse is a self-care coach who helps people reduce burnout and find balance in their lives. To grow her subscriber list and find new clients, she created this 5-day self-care challenge to demonstrate how she can help! <a href="https://nourishnestbreathe.ck.page/selfcarechallenge" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Check it out here.</a></li>
<li>Jay Clouse is a podcaster, writer, and entrepreneur who has a range of exciting projects to teach and support others. One of them is the Tweet 100 challenge which aims to help him and others be more consistent about tweeting and expanding their reach. <a href="https://join.tweet100.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Check it out here.</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Free incentives</h3>
<p><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-39174 lazy" data-src="https://media.convertkit.com/post/13caH4m4-GYAC-2021-recap-dot-printable.jpg?fm=pjpg" alt="grow your audience challenge" width="1500" height="1364" /></p>
<p>The oldest trick in the book, but one of the most successful ones is <a href="https://convertkit.com/lead-magnets" target="_blank" rel="noopener">offering a freebie</a>: a piece of content that your audience will find valuable for free. This could be a free webinar, a free 10-min coaching session, downloadable templates, or ebooks. Here are some examples:</p>
<ul>
<li>Sarah Barnett is a NC science Olympiad coach for an elementary school and provides resources, like the dot printable frames, to help other teachers. <a href="https://simply-steam-llc.ck.page/26d254fe36" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Check it out here.</a></li>
<li>Josh Pelland is a fitness coach who specializes in exercise science and offers his audience a guide that breaks down the numbers and concept of how to optimize your training sessions. Anyone interested in downloading the guide is an ideal audience for him! <a href="https://data-drivenstrength.ck.page/rpe-guide-version2" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Check it out here.</a></li>
<li>Emma Kathryn is a contemporary and historical romance writer looking to build her list by offering a free book for subscribing to her newsletter. <a href="https://marvelous-leader-3730.ck.page/ee140515bc" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Check it out here.</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Newsletter, quizzes, and online courses</h3>
<p><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-39173 lazy" data-src="https://media.convertkit.com/post/B34PEIIt-GYAC-2021-recap-art-skills.jpg?fm=pjpg" alt="grow your audience challenge" width="1500" height="647" /></p>
<p>One of the key takeaways from this challenge is to keep learning more about your audience, iterating on your landing pages, and finding what catches their attention. For some, it might be as simple as creating a landing page to subscribe to your newsletter. For others, it might be offering an online course. Here are some creators who did something a little different:</p>
<ul>
<li>Albom Adventures is a travel blog that inspires travel through photography. To grow their email list and drive more traffic to their blog, they created a simple landing page allowing followers interested in their travel journey to subscribe to their newsletter. <a href="https://albom-adventures.ck.page/9e78a3ba13" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Check it out here.</a></li>
<li>Wanja nechtan Gröger is a drummer who offers online drumming courses. To get his audience interested in purchasing his course, he offers his free online course for a limited time to generate interest and let his audience get a sense of his teaching style before they commit. <a href="https://wanjanechtangroeger.ck.page/c266cdd82f" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Check it out here.</a></li>
<li>Carrie is the creator of Artist Strong and is passionate about teaching art. She focuses on her audience’s pain points and engages them with a <a href="https://convertkit.com/how-to-make-a-personality-quiz" target="_blank" rel="noopener">quiz</a> to get them to subscribe to her list. <a href="https://artiststrong.ck.page/50c1bf8556" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Check it out here.</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Join the next ConvertKit challenge</h3>
<p>Excited to be in the next challenge? Join the <a href="https://convertkit.com/challenge/grow-your-audience" target="_blank" rel="noopener">challenge waitlist here</a> to be the first to hear about our next upcoming challenge. For resources you can tune into now, register for one of our upcoming <a href="https://convertkit.com/training" target="_blank" rel="noopener">creator trainings</a>.</p>


ConvertKit’s November 2021 Deliverability Report

Grow Your Audience 2021 recap

In this Article

Own the relationship with your audience

Frances Wong

How to serve multiple audience types

ConvertKit’s November 2021 Deliverability Report