More than 150,000 women have completed Tiffany “The Budgetnista” Aliche’s Live Richer Challenge. The roughly 30-day challenge participants step-by-step instructions on how to get their financial lives in order, get out of debt, and start saving money.
Collectively, Tiffany’s tribe has saved $17 million and paid off $1.5 in debt!
I first heard Tiffany tell the story of how she started the challenge and how that’s turned into a thriving business at FinCon last year, and am excited to share it with you this week.
This year, The Budgetnetista expects to bring in more than $500,000 from speaking, book sales, sponsors and affiliate relationships, and a new private membership academy.
I think her model can be replicated across a number of different niches and industries so you can apply these same strategies and tactics in your business.
Tune in to hear how the former preschool teacher came up with the idea for the challenge, the innovative way she grew her tribe, and how giving it all away for free turned into a very profitable venture.
Learn:
- How Tiffany came up with The Live Richer Challenge.
- How she recruited her first participants and the couple “viral” hacks she used to expand her reach.
- How she delivered the content of the challenge.
- How she’s kept the participants engaged long after the original challenge ended.
- The 4 main income streams she’s built on the back of her super engaged tribe.
- Tiffany’s #1 tip for Side Hustle Nation.
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How Tiffany Became the Budgetnista and Started the Live Richer Challenge
Tiffany had been working as a preschool teacher for 10 years when she lost her job during the 2009 recession. Like a lot of people, the recession hit her hard and she didn’t just lose her job, but her savings, pension, foreclosed on her house, and more.
It’s times like this when you need to dig deep. Tiffany decided she didn’t want to go back to teaching, so she started volunteering at organizations like the Boys and Girls Club and United Way. With her background in teaching and some of the financial lessons her parents taught her, it wasn’t long before Tiffany was helping out by writing financial plans and curriculums for these organizations.
This spread to her giving friends and family advice on budgeting and saving. As her circle of contacts grew, in late 2014 she invited her Facebook friends to join a 5-week challenge to get their finances in order.
The First Live Richer Challenge and Growing a Community
The first challenge was a 5-week challenge. Over the 5 weeks, Tiffany would send an email every day with clear instructions on what to do to save some money. For example, the instructions could be to call a service provider and ask for your bill to be reduced. Tiffany provided step-by-step instructions complete with scripts detailing what to say to the company.
At first, Tiffany was writing up the emails daily and emailing her list all of the information in the body of the email. This was becoming time-consuming so she started writing up content on her blog and directing her email list to visit her blog. This also gave her the opportunity to encourage her visitors to Tweet and share her content, as well as directing them to a Facebook group she had started.
The Facebook Groups platform makes it easy for people post questions and discuss their progress with others without the need for Tiffany to reply to everyone individually. Tiffany’s Live Richer Group started growing rapidly as people discussed their progress with each other in the group. After the first year Tiffany had more than 20k people signed up for the challenge, and almost as many in the group.
Growing the challenge wasn’t easy in the beginning however. Tiffany used a wide range of marketing tactics, from asking all her friends and family to join, adding as many friends on Facebook as possible, setting selected people as “Challenge Leaders” and tasking them to sign up 10-20 new members, and using some catchy headlines to pique interest.
A nice little marketing hack Tiffany used was to set one of the daily tasks to find an accountability partner and have them complete the challenge with you. Two for one!
The Second Challenge and Using Automation
Tiffany’s original plan was to do one challenge, but the success of the challenge and the large community she had built up had other ideas. So, she started generating interest for the second challenge that would run in Jan and Feb of 2016. In the lead up to the launch, Tiffany kept the engagement high with her list by emailing them with recommended resources and recommendations.
She has now set both challenges up as automated email responder processes. So anyone can join either of the challenges and run through all the tasks. The first challenge covered budgeting, saving, credit, debt, insurance, investing, and money mindset. While the second challenge covered savings in more detail.
How Do You Monetize off the Back of Free Content?
Since Tiffany was giving away all this information for free, I was curious how the challenge group and her engaged community brought in revenue.
Book Sales
At the bottom of every challenge blog post, Tiffany invites participants – if they prefer – to get the content in book form instead. Even though the information is the same, the books are selling really well, with over 1000 copies sold this month.
Speaking Gigs
With a huge community comes authority and credibility. Tiffany takes paid speaking gigs at colleges and companies. She recently signed a contract to speak at Ford, and they even sent her a car.
Live Richer Academy
This year Tiffany launched the Live Richer Academy. This costs the user $12.99 a month and gives them access to premium content put together by experts in different financial niches. So far she has over 4k students enrolled, making this a $40k+ per month revenue stream all on its own.
Affiliate Commissions
Affiliate marketing goes hand-in-hand with large traffic numbers. Tiffany recommends helpful products and services she uses via affiliate links. She admitted she didn’t think this would be an impactful earning channel, but has netted over $60k in affiliate commissions in the last year.
Notable other projects Tiffany is working on includes penning a children’s book around finance, setting up monthly offline meetings in different states, and selling some branded t-shirts.
Tiffany’s #1 Tip for Side Hustle Nation
‘Build your tribe NOW!”
Episode Links:
- TheBudgetnista.com
- The Live Richer Facebook Group
- LiveRicherChallenge.com
- Tiffany’s books on Amazon
- Eventbrite
- AWeber
- Infusionsoft
- Live Richer Academy
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