This year I thought we should do it differently. This is partly because the pressure is on to be more creative than last year – eek! – but also because I thought it would be great to harness some of your creativity.

So, the plan is that we open it up as a competition and ask you to come up with your most creative scripts for this year’s Thirty Day Challenge podcast introduction.

If you feel up to the challenge, get your creativity flowing and write a script for me. The best one will be turned into an audio “masterpiece” and will have the honour of being heard by Thirty Day Challengers throughout the world (I’ll even send you a copy for posterity).

Now, because this is also to help you experience the reality of creating online audio, there are going to be some restrictions. Much as I would love you to be able to use any music, any voice actor and any creative concept you would like, this is not going to be possible due to costs and copyright laws.

So, this is the framework you need to work within:

1. Script to record should be between 30 and 90 seconds – any longer and it gets a bit tiresome (in fact, a minute of tightly written copy is preferable to 90secs with unnecessary padding)
2. You can use either a male or female voiceover or both but you are restricted to Jon Iles and/or Sally Williams (click on their names to listen to their showreels). This is simply because I work with them and know they will be happy to participate in the project. Jon is able to do some character voices and that fantastic deep movie trailer voice. If you don’t know whether something is possible with those voiceovers, include it anyway and I’ll see what I can do.
3. You cannot specify a particular music track as this is likely to cost a fortune in royalties, but you can say that music should be in the style of, for example, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Titanic etc. Or, you can simply specify that you would like it to have romantic music or sci-fi music. And, yes, you can have more than one piece of music on the podcast.
4. You can use sound effects (but please don’t make them too tricky to find or create – the sound of a specific Ferrari engine while travelling at 100 mph may be beyond my capabilities )
5. You can’t completely rip-off someone else’s work. For example, much as Ed would like a Kung-Fu Panda theme this year, it will probably breach copyright and have Dreamworks suing our a*ses quicker than you can say “Prepare for Awesomeness” Writing a script that completely mimics a film or tv script is a no-no (as well as being uncreative) but the occasional quote or referencing a film or tv show should be OK.

Once you have your ideas, please write them down in a script. Start with a brief paragraph explaining your overall concept, and then write your script, making it clear what is said by the voiceover, where the music comes in and where any sound effects are required.

The more detail the better, but don’t go overboard and write a screenplay! You’ve got 10 days to get your entry in (I’ll stop taking entries at midnight on Saturday 12th July), which should allow time to create the intro in time for the main challenge starting on August 1st. And if I really get my stuff together I will film some of the creation process too so you can see what’s involved.

Paste your script into an email and send it to lisa.hartwell (at) gmail.com. Include your real name, your forum name and a contact email address.

Oh, and if you aren’t already a Thirty Day Challenge participant, please sign up so you can get to grips with the concept of the Challenge before your write your script.

I think that’s everything but feel free to ask questions here on the blog or over at the relevant thread on the Thirty Day Challenge forum.

If this is your first year of the challenge and think I am speaking another language when I mention podcast intros, then take a listen to these previous ones for some ideas.

This was the intro in 2006 (remember it was originally created for the Smackdown battle between Ed Dale and Frank Kern in their UltraUnderachievers program):

Download audio file (Thirty_Day_Challenge_Podcast_Intro_2006.mp3)

and this was last year’s:

Download audio file (30DC-podcast-intro.mp3)

Time to get creative!

But the main reason for this post is that another challenge is happening online at the moment that you might want to catch up on, especially if you are into blogging and/or selling websites. John Cow and Garry Conn are going head-to-head (in fact they have already started) to see who can set up a brand new blog and then sell it for the most money within a month.

I love this sort of challenge, because they promise full disclosure of what they are doing and they are letting you watch for free. It’s one of those win-win situations. They have to succeed (or at least come close) otherwise they look stupid, and in the meantime you get to learn heaps from them.

Dan Raine did a similar thing with his $15k challenge and although he missed the mark by a few hundred dollars (and has been paying for it ever since with the pink thong video), he proved his credentials as an excellent marketer. That made a helluva lot more people want to learn from him and take part in the Thirty Day Challenge and/or Immediate Edge.

I suspect that John Cow and Garry Conn are using this as an opportunity to raise their blog readerships and with a huge prize giveaway as well, they should succeed. If you want to learn more about the challenge and all the prizes (and there’s some lovely stuff there including courses from Ed ‘Mankini’ Dale, Stompernet, Frank Kern, Jeff Walker…) then check out the Cowpetition (see what he did there?).

Especially if you are starting out online at the moment I highly recommend you grab all these free offers whenever you can – whether it be a fly-on-the-wall moment like this one where you can learn by watching others or a participatory challenge like 30DC. As someone pointed out in reference to last year’s Thirty Day Challenge – they learnt more from doing that free training than they ever did from the $1500 course they had just bought..and it made the difference between throwing in the towel with their business and becoming successful and profitable. You can start buying the high-priced courses once you have some basics and cash flow behind you.

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