How to Create a 5-Day Challenge – Even If You Don’t Have a Challenge Idea

You’ve likely seen challenges pop up in your feeds, or even participated in one, and now you want to create one for your people. Great idea! They’re super fun and a great way to bring new people into your world or provide value to your existing audience.

Why a Challenge?

A “challenge” in the marketing world is typically a structured, short-term program designed to help participants achieve a specific goal or learn a particular skill in a set number of days—often 3, 5, or 7 days.

It’s an engaging, interactive experience where participants complete small, actionable tasks each day for five days. The goal is to provide quick wins that lead to measurable progress – it’s all about helping your people get results!

Why Are Challenges Effective?

1. Engagement: Challenges create a sense of community and urgency, motivating participants to stay involved.
2. Value-Driven: They offer valuable, bute-sized content that participants can immediately apply, building trust in your expertise.
3. List-Building: When you require a sign-up (which you should!), it helps you grow your email list or audience.
4. Sales Funnel Starter: Challenges are great for nurturing leads. By the end, participants are more likely to invest in more of your paid offerings because they’ve experienced your value firsthand.
5. Low Commitment: Five days feels manageable for most people, making it more likely they’ll participate fully.

The 3 Core Activities of a Launch

Any time you set out to create a new offer, your long list of tasks generally boil down to three things:

1. Product Development
2. Funnel Build
3. Launch Activities & List Building

It can feel like juggling three flaming torches—while riding a unicycle!

Here’s just a sample of All The Things you have to consider:

• What specific outcome do you want participants to achieve?
• How does the challenge align with your overall business goals?
• Who is this challenge for?
• What pain points, desires, or goals does your audience have?
• What topic will resonate most with your audience?
• Is it broad enough to attract interest but focused enough to deliver results?
• What specific task or lesson will participants complete each day?
• How will each day build on the previous one?
• Will you use videos, worksheets, emails, or a mix of formats?
• Will you include live sessions, pre-recorded content, or both?
• How much time and effort will participants need to invest daily?
• What additional resources (templates, guides, checklists) will you provide?
• Will there be a fee, or is it free?
• Where will the challenge be hosted (email, Facebook group, private community)?
• How will you market the challenge (social media, email, ads)?
• What promotional assets will you need (graphics, videos, posts)?
• What action will participants take after the challenge ends?
• Will you offer a paid product or service as the next step?
• How will you nurture leads who don’t convert immediately?
• Will you send a post-challenge survey for feedback?
• Can the challenge content be turned into a course, lead magnet, or other asset?
• When will the challenge start and end?
• What are the deadlines for content creation and promotion?
• Will you hire help for content creation or tech setup?
• What key performance indicators (KPIs) will you track (sign-ups, completion rate, sales)?
• What platforms will you use for email marketing, landing pages, and content delivery?

Between brainstorming and creating your product, building a high-converting funnel, and executing a flawless launch strategy, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and stretched thin… until it finally kills your motivation before you even get to launch day.

{Just writing this list gave me anxiety flashbacks, but don’t worry – we’ve got you!}

This is exactly why we created Pagewheel – to simplify and speed up the offer creation-all-the-way-through-to-sales process from weeks down to hours – or even minutes!

Ready? Open up Pagewheel in another tab and let’s get to it!

Brainstorm a Challenge Using Copy Packs

If you already know what kind of challenge you want to create, you can go ahead and skip to the next section… but if you’d like to see what our outline looks like, go ahead and give it a try anyway!

Open Copy Packs

To get to Copy Packs from your Pagewheel dashboard, click “Get Your Copy Packs” or “Take me to the Copy Packs”.

1. Tell Us About Your Product or Program

For brainstorming, begin with “5-Day challenge for…” and finish the sentence with who you serve and the problem they struggle with.

Beneath the input field you can see an example: “Weight loss program for female food addicts.” Notice that it is clear, simple language, not a snazzy ‘cute’ marketing-type name. Here’s a breakdown of the parts of the given example:

“Weight loss program” is the WHAT.

“female” is the WHO…

“…food addicts” describes the problem they need solved.

For this example, we would input “5-day challenge for female food addicts.”

2. Pick Your Content Pack

• Select “Products & Programs”

3. Select the Options You Want

• Check “Product Ideas”
• Click the <Take Me To My Copy> button

Even though Copy Packs creates a list of physical product ideas and program or coaching ideas, since we’re in brainstorming mode it’s a good idea to look at all of them.

You can see in our example here, we get great ideas for a challenge focus like ‘portion control’, ‘mindful eating’, ‘hydration’, and more.

Need more ideas? Click the ‘a’ with the arrow around it next to the Download button for some Pagewheel AI assistance.

Pick your favorite and Boom! – now you have your theme for a new 5-day challenge.

Create the Challenge Syllabus with Copy Packs

Once you have chosen a theme for your 5-day challenge, you’re ready to have Copy Packs create the 5-Day Challenge Plan for you.

Start by clicking ‘Take me back, I want more copy packs.” beneath the Download button.

1. Tell Us About Your Product or Program

This time, revise your input by adding your challenge theme, such as “5-Day No-Sugar Challenge for Female Food Addicts” or 5-Day Intermittent Fasting Challenge for Female Food Addicts.”

2. Pick Your Content Pack

• Select “Products & Programs”

3. Select the Options You Want

• Check “5-Day Challenge Plan”
• Click the <Take Me To My Copy> button

There it is – a complete 5-day challenge plan, complete with homework suggestions and follow-up questions to engage your participants.

Commit to a Launch Date & Start Promoting

Money loves speed, or put another way, procrastination is where businesses go to die. While we all may intuitively agree with this, it’s one thing when it’s theoretical and entirely another when you’re actually doing it.

When I started my first business, I unfortunately mastered the skill of procrastination, often disguised as busy work that wasn’t actually moving my business forward.

Client deadlines, on the other hand, were super important to me, so while I would push myself to over deliver for my clients and never miss a deadline, I didn’t treat my own business with the same level of respect.

A trick that worked for me to take the good habits I have with client work and apply that same approach to my audience. It’s a subtle shift in focus – from a launch ‘for my business’ to a launch ‘for my audience’.

While I might procrastinate for myself, I couldn’t let my audience or customers down any more than I could my clients. Setting a deadline, committing to it – and my audience – by making it public, replaced the procrastination with motivation.

Fun Fact: Our subconscious tries to protect us by keeping us in an environment that it knows how to deal with. Which means it does NOT like trying new things. So it tries to stop us with feelings of fear, doubt, distractions and delay tactics.

Everyone, whether just beginning the entrepreneurial journey or a seasoned business owner creating your umpteenth offer, can feel trepidation with a launch. Acknowledge your subconscious is trying to protect you, then set those feelings aside and keep moving forward!

The ‘Ugly Baby’ Approach

“But wait, I haven’t created the challenge yet!” you might be thinking.

Nope, but remember, you have to juggle product development, funnel building and your promotional activities at the same time in order to condense the timeline from idea conception to launch.

What you do have at this point is enough to be able to set a date for your challenge to begin, and start building anticipation with your audience even as you create the funnel and nail down the details for each day of your challenge.

Do you have to do everything at once? No! BUT the successful competition is consistently putting out offer after offer, building their audience and revenue. They’re definitely not dilly-dallying.

Even though Pagewheel does so much for you, it’s still on you to push past perfectionism (another subconscious attempt to keep you stuck) and get your offers out in the world.

I use what I call the Ugly Baby method. Just follow the process, all the way to the finish line, pushing through that feeling of ‘it’s not good enough, I need to fix this, and that, and these other things too…’.

No matter how ugly of a baby you might think it is, it’s still beautiful the moment it’s born. So push it out already!

Remember, it’s really your subconscious just trying to keep you safe by pushing perfectionism as a form of procrastination. You ARE good enough and so is the challenge you’re creating.

IF you have time, then you can always go back and make it ‘better’… though the reality is you probably won’t have to, or you’ll only make refinements based on what you learned from your audience feedback while you conducted the challenge.

What you create with Pagewheel to package up your expertise and share with your people is absolutely good enough to build a thriving business that serves your people well.

Copy Packs Two-Week Launch Plan

How do you balance All The Things? With a two-week launch plan from Pagewheel’s Copy Packs.

Once again, click “Take me back, I want more copy packs” to get back to the Copy Packs home page.

1. Tell Us About Your Product or Program

Keep your 5-day challenge input field the same, no changes needed.

2. Pick Your Content Pack

• Select “Products & Programs”

3. Select the Options You Want

• Check “Two-Week Launch Plan”
• Click the <Take Me To My Copy> button

Not everyone uses every possible promotional channel. Do you communicate to your audience via YouTube? A Facebook group? Email?

Feel free to adapt your launch plan to fit you and your audience. But no matter the channel, be sure and check out Copy Packs for more assistance with promotional content for social media, ad copy, video sales letters and more!

Copy Packs Product Launch Email 5-Pack

If you’ve got a list, you’ll see promoting your challenge to it is part of the launch plan. {If you don’t, then your challenge is a great way to get started!}

Not sure what to say? Feel awkward when it’s time to sell? No worries – Copy Packs to the rescue!

Go back to the Copy Packs main page, then:

1. Tell Us About Your Product or Program

Keep your 5-day challenge input field the same, no changes needed.

2. Pick Your Content Pack

• Select “Email Marketing”

3. Select the Options You Want

• Check “Product Launch Email 5-Pack”
• Click the <Take Me To My Copy> button

With Copy Packs, you can create a complete email launch campaign in minutes by copy-pasting the content to your ESP, then schedule the emails according to your launch plan.

Build the Funnel

A sales funnel is the step-by-step journey a potential customer takes from first discovering your product or service to making a purchase. It typically includes stages like awareness, interest, decision, and action, with the goal of guiding leads through a seamless process that converts them into paying customers.

An offer page is a key component of the sales funnel. It’s a dedicated page designed to present your product or service in a persuasive and visually appealing way – that converts leads into paying customers!

We designed Pagewheel to make offer creation as fast and as easy as possible. Whether you need to create an accompanying resource or not, Page will create your offer page in just a few clicks!

Challenge With a Workbook

If your challenge involves creating some kind of workbook or digital resource for your audience, select the yellow “Go to the Product Builder” where you can make the resource (‘product’) and Pagewheel will take you directly from that to creating the offer and delivery pages.

Tip: Select Ready-to-Edit Products then search “5 Day Challenge Workbook” for a ready-made workbook with a wide variety of workbook page layouts you can customize for your challenge.

Need help? Check out our Product Builder tutorials.

Challenge Without a Workbook

If not, then select the green “Go to the Webpage Builder” to skip straight to building the offer page for your challenge.

Need help? Check out our tutorials for Offer & Delivery pages.

Create, Review, Edit and Publish in Just a Few Clicks!

This is the heart and soul of Pagewheel. No need for expensive, complicated funnel building software that takes a technical degree or weeks to figure out how to use and get connected. Give Pagewheel a little information about your challenge, customize the brand elements, and let Pagewheel do the rest!

Tip: Videos convert better. Period. It’s the best way to connect with your audience, and build the know/like/trust factor for people who are just getting to know you.

Add a video section to your offer page for a Video Sales Letter (create the script in Copy Packs), and add a thank you video to your delivery page the same way.

In fact, you can add up to 12 videos to the delivery page, perfect for delivering evergreen challenges and courses!

Develop Your Challenge

Ok, you’ve selected a start date, got your challenge offer page live, and you have your launch plan in hand with Copy Packs at your fingertips for promoting your launch.

Now, over the two weeks while you’re promoting the challenge, you can continue to develop your 5-Day Challenge Plan.

If your challenge is email or SMS, you can write the copy for each day then get it all scheduled.

Going live? Make sure you know how to use your tech, your lighting and sound is working, and practice your presentations – out loud! The more you practice, the more natural you will sound.

Creating additional resources? Now’s the time. You do not need fancy slides; in fact a little bit of ‘roughness’ or ‘real-ness’ is actually preferred over ‘polished’ because of the feeling of authenticity it conveys.

Conduct Your Challenge

Lights, camera, action!

However it is that you are hosting your challenge – live on Zoom, in a popup Facebook group, via daily emails or SMS, take a deep breath and have fun.

Record and save everything you can for evergreen content, social proof, feedback for improvement or next offers, etc.

Deliver what you promised for your audience, show them how much you care about them and helping them achieve the results, and you’ll do great. We believe in you!

Tip: Do a dry run and check your tech a day or two prior! Simpler is usually better, both for you and your participants.

Pro Tips

1. Make it Yours

We do our best to have Pagewheel make the very best products for you. BUT we encourage everyone to read through everything out loud and make those little adjustments that personalize it to your voice and style.

{Yes do this, but no, don’t let it be a reason to procrastinate! Imperfect action is better than no action!}

2. Set Expectations

Reduce refunds by being super clear about what your audience can expect from your challenge.

What will they get out of participating, each day and at the end of the five days? Is it live? Are there replays? Where is the workbook? Is there homework? How much time will they need to set aside each day?

Be clear in your sales copy, in your promotional material, in your delivery page and email once they purchase it, and even as part of the challenge itself.

Consider starting each day’s instructions with setting expectations by stating the goal of the day. Keeping this in mind helped you stay focused during the challenge creation phase, but participants also need help focusing so they can get the results they are hoping for.

3. Challenge Reminders

It’s impossible to remind people too much of when the challenge starts, where it’s being hosted and how to get in – links, passcodes, etc., and how to get help.

No matter how much you do this, keep an eye out everywhere your audience communicates with you for those frantic people who can’t find the link at the last minute.

4. Challenge Follow-Up

Check in with your audience every day and see how they’re doing. It helps them feel connected and motivated, and it helps you suppor them while also gathering important feedback.

Do they have everything they need to succeed? Are they overwhelmed? Are they asking for more? This is GOLD for future offer ideas!

Getting great results? Screenshot their comments to use on your offer page and promotional content for social proof.

Tip: Search “Smart Survey” in our ready-made batches in the product builder for a list of questions that help people give powerful testimonials for you.

5. Make Your 5-Day Challenge Evergreen

While we preach ‘Make More Offers’, it doesn’t mean to forget about the ones you already made!

Making offers evergreen is a great way to build a portfolio of offers that continue to bring revenue into your business month after month, year after year.

Consider promoting it to your list from time to time with different angles. For example, our weight loss challenge can be an after-the-holidays/new-years-resolution challenge, a get-ready-for-summer challenge, fit-that-dress-for-the-special-occasion, etc.

6. End Your Challenge with an Upsell

Challenges are often an entry point for new people to join your audience. Whether free or paid, ideally the challenge steers participants to the next step, your core offer.

In our ‘Weight loss for female food addict’ example, we might offer a monthly membership to a coaching program where they can build on the momentum they achieved during the challenge.

If you’re new and don’t have an upsell to offer, that’s ok!

Once you do have one, if it makes sense you can always offer it the next time you host this challenge, or if you made it evergreen, add the upsell offer later.

Now What?

Make more offers!!!

This is what we do as entrepreneurs – we solve problems for customers (or help them solve their problems.)

If you have an audience, ask them! If you don’t, keep putting offers out there until you find the one that resonates with your people.

Congratulations, you just solved the problem they needed help with. Once a problem is solved, the next obstacle arises.

Fundamentally, the customer journey and the entrepreneurial journey are two sides of the same path!

Additional Resources

• Listen to Holly about how imperfect action is one of the best business strategies.
• Don’t overcomplicate your challenge – Rachel & Holly show how small offers build solid foundations for big businesses!
• Start and nurture your email list with Copy Packs – Rachel shows you how!
• Become a Referral Partner – join our Affiliate Program!