If you are a business owner who is struggling to get traction organically or get people to sign up for your program or service, chances are you’ve done your fair share of research on how to increase traffic.
All over the internet, you will see multiple courses and programs that claim to help you get results.
The 5-day challenge that I will be talking about in this article is one of those ways to do just that.
Now this is not some quick fix or instant solution to your business problems. The work that you will put in during the 5-day challenge is more of a solid foundation that will help you build a business that gives you the freedom you are looking for.
WHAT IS A 5-DAY CHALLENGE?
So, why 5 days? Why not 7 days or 15 days?
Well, people tend to lose interest easily.
You might think 7 days would be manageable, but if you think about it, nowadays, people have so many other things to do that 7 days may be seen as too much of a commitment. 5-day challenges are good because they usually fall from Monday to Friday, which conditions the participants into thinking “well, it’s not going to affect my weekdays or rest days anyway.”
Another thing you need to take note of is that this challenge must be free-of-charge and available to your target market with the aim of finding the solution to a problem they are facing.
The goal of a 5-day challenge should be to draw traffic or leads into your business which is what we will be tackling in this article…
HOW IS A 5-DAY CHALLENGE GOING TO HELP ME?
If you want to build a business where people see you as an authority and lineup to work with you, then a 5-day challenge is going to help you get there.
I personally chose to conduct one because I was naturally curious how it can benefit me after I saw 2 of my Facebook friends use it to build a 7-figure business. It was because of my curiosity and willingness to try out new things for my business that I decided to run a 5-day challenge myself.
The main purpose of my challenge was to launch and sell my group program in a circle where nobody knew my name and skills.
In fact, this challenge helped me grow from zero to making just over £2,000 in under 4 weeks!
Another wonderful thing about this challenge is that, unlike programs of Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula and Russel Brunson’s’ webinars, it allows you to start small with very minimal financial outlay.
You will only need to pay for a few things to setup the challenge such as tools you require or paid ads if you think this is necessary.
If you are strategic with how you run the challenge and promote your program, your small investment will continue to grow, provided that the quality of the challenge continues to grow as well.
IS THIS GOING TO BE WORTH MY TIME?
The biggest requirement that the challenge will require from you is your time. You need to put in the time and effort to provide your market with a great interactive experience during those 5 days.
This in return helps you understand your customers’ wants and how your products can address their needs.
Conducting a 5-day challenge will definitely take up more than 5 days as the host, but from my experience, it was all worth it in the end. I’m sure if you follow along on the process, you will reap the same benefits too.
The way that I will be breaking down the each step is going to be based on everything that I went through and everything I did for my challenge so that you can apply it to your own business as well.
Here is what we will be talking about in this article:
- What Makes a 5-Day Challenge Successful?
- When is the Best Time to Run a 5-Day Challenge?
- How to Run the 5-Day Challenge
-
- Name the Challenge
- Set a Goal for Your Challenge
- Create Content for the Challenge
- Define the Timeline
- Organize the Pre-Challenge Setup
- Launch the Challenge!
- Engage with the Participants
- How to Close the Challenge and Make the Final Offer
- Some tools I used during the challenge
- The Results of My 5-Day Challenge
- Tega’s Top 10 Takeaways
- Will I Be Hosting Another 5-Day Challenge?
So, grab a cup of coffee. This is going to be a long one.
Let’s get to it!
WHAT MAKES A 5-DAY CHALLENGE SUCCESSFUL?
What composes a good 5-day challenge?
First off, you need to meet people where they are at. This means that any content you put out must always speak to your target audience.
The goal is to create logical and emotional steps to move them forward from point A to point B, which will eventually lead them to buying your product or service.
The most successful challenges are the ones where people start out at the beginning feeling confused and got questions but do not know how to move forward. They feel overwhelmed and lack clarity.
By the end of the challenge (or middle), you should be able to give them that “aha” moment if you want your challenge to be successful. Once these people have that “aha” moment, they will be much more convinced to buy the product or service you were trying to sell in the first place.
You want to become their “online hero” by giving them a new way of looking at something to help them solve their problem.
Here are other critical elements to a high-converting challenge:
Element #1: It must be simple and straightforward
If you set big, complicated tasks, it will overwhelm people and will just put them off. All elements, from the registration to the challenge itself, must be super simple and straightforward.
You should leave little to no confusion from their end by thoroughly explaining everything in the challenge
Set the expectation that the challenge is simple and not some difficult hurdle that they need to face.
Element #2: Be engaging and encourage engagement!
Engagement is the biggest thing that converts people in the challenge.
Even if you give them everything they need to succeed during the challenge, even if you make it all simple and straightforward, the biggest thing that matters is building a relationship with your audience. This includes getting their questions answered and supporting them.
The engagement should not just come from your end, however. It takes two to tango.
Set some rules to encourage people to engage and you could even set rewards for the most engaged person. Include things like telling them to comment if they are done with a task.
In my case, I really took the time to answer all their questions and respond to their comments when needed.
You need to build a community and make people feel supported!
Element #3: Focus on small wins
Now remember that the participants of this challenge will be starting from square one.
Sometimes, if we are already an expert in a certain topic, we humans tend to forget what it was like to be an absolute beginner. You need to understand where they are coming from. And that means that you cannot overwhelm them with a whole bunch of novel tasks even if for you, it seems easy and doable.
Just pick one outcome that you want from this challenge rather than trying to make them experts in a certain field.
This is only a 5-day challenge, so you can only expect so much from them.
You will want your outcome to be real, tangible, and simple. Do not focus on vague goals like happiness or enlightenment!
You need to be very micro and specific with what you want to deliver and focus on small wins rather than huge jumps.
Element #4: Be authentic
This last element may seem super obvious, but sometimes we lose ourselves in trying to impress others or make the sale.
You only have 5 days to make a good impression. The best way to do that is to just be yourself. You cannot please everyone obviously and you may lose some people along the process.
That is exactly why it is so important to be authentic. This helps you draw the right kind of people into your business and weed the wrong ones out.
WHEN IS THE BEST TIME TO RUN A 5-DAY CHALLENGE?
Is there really a best time in your business to run a 5-day challenge?
Well the answer is subjective.
I personally do not know what is best for your business, so only you will be able to determine when is the best time to run this challenge.
What I can say however is that if you have an established business that is already serving a good amount of people, then you will find this challenge beneficial.
Now, I am not saying that if you do not have an established business that you cannot run the challenge. This just means that if you do not yet have a useful product or service in place yet, it may take longer for you to get results because much work will have to be done on the front end.
The work can range from developing the assets of the business to even deciding on the offer you want to make at the end of the challenge.
Another point that you can take into consideration is whether you want to start the challenge at the beginning of the month or when people’s salaries are about to come in.
Why?
That way, when you are ready to pitch your offer, they will not worry too much about spending! This explains why lots of big sales come up during the start or middle of the month.
One last point that I can suggest is to not run your challenge during the holidays. People will be busy with their families that they may not have the time to focus on a 5-day challenge.
HOW TO RUN THE 5-DAY CHALLENGE?
Name the Challenge
First thing you need to do is think of a name for your challenge. Make sure that the name is straightforward and clear enough to explain the benefits and results people will get from the challenge.
From my experience, creating the name for the challenge was a challenge in itself. I knew who I wanted to speak to, and I wanted the name to call out to the people who I made the challenge for, but I didn’t know how to make it sound catchy but not too hype-y.
Every time I would produce a name, it would seem too long like “5-Day Ads to Leads Challenge.” Long names would not be memorable to the participants and, from a technical point of view, make it difficult to get a nice URL.
In the end, I decided to call my challenge “Ads to Leads Challenge” because the aim was to help people drive traffic from their ads.
It was short, simple, and easy to understand.
Set a Goal for Your Challenge
When deciding on the goal for the challenge, you need to figure out what makes sense for you by asking yourself important questions such as…
- What stage is your business at?
- How have you been performing the past few months?
- How effective and helpful has your product or service been to your current customers?
Remember to make your goals SMART:
My goal for the challenge was to have 250 people take part because it made sense to me considering the stage that my business was at.
Once you decide on your goal, everything else that follows should fall into place such as how you market the challenge and choose who will help promote the challenge for you.
Create Content for the Challenge
In relation to keeping the goal of your challenge simple, each of the tasks to be fulfilled during the 5-days must be easy as well.
Think of very micro elements that you think are “aha” moments for your participants.
In my case, I wanted to teach people how to get more leads from their ads, but I did not jump directly into the complicated process of launching a Facebook ads campaign or anything of that sort.
To give you a better idea, here is the module I have prepared for the challenge:
Day 1: Getting Setup
Day 2: Choosing an Offer
Day 3: Write Words Get Paid/Choosing Creative
Day 4: Setting up the Ad
Day 5: Follow up + Maintaining the Ad + 2 Advanced Tricks (Pixels & Retargeting)
If you are an expert in Facebook ads, you may be thinking “Really, Tega? These tasks for 5-year olds!”
But from a beginner’s perspective, these were the exact “aha” moments the participants needed to setup the foundation for effective ads for their business
Define the Timeline
Deciding when to start your challenge is important because it gives you a map of the things you will need to do and when you will need to execute them.
When thinking of the timeline for your 5-day challenge, take note that this is not only going to take up 5 days for you as the facilitator. You need taking into consideration additional tasks such as promotions before the challenge, and the post-challenge activities as well including closing deals and making sales.
In my case, I decided to run the challenge from July 6 to 10. And in doing that, I knew that I needed a 2-week lead time for me to promote the challenge. That meant I had to promote the challenge from the 22nd of June.
To make sure that the participants were fully prepared for the challenge, I had to get people into the group on the Friday before the 6th. This allowed them to do the early steps that I needed them to take to fully maximize their benefits from the challenge.
Even after the challenge, I had to do promotions for program which entailed setting up ads and accommodating those who were interested.
You need to set the schedule for all the minute details from planning, to launching, to adding people to the group, to clearing your time for the live broadcasts, and so on. This will all depend on when you decide to host your challenge.
Organize the Pre-challenge Setup
There are a few other technical things you will need to setup before starting the challenge.
For me, this meant buying the domain name (I bought mine on namecheap.com) and setting up the lead capture/notification for the challenge (I used clickfunnels.com).
I made my landing page extremely easy to read so that it would not discourage them from giving the details I need. The only content that I put in this page was a brief overview of what people are going to get if they sign up for the challenge.
If they did decide to push through and sign up for the challenge, I asked for only their email address to keep it simple and quick.
Once they have completed that section, they are then led to a thank you page with instructions on what to expect from the challenge and when to join the group.
The last thing I did was setup the Facebook groups page. There are a few settings that you need to take note of when you create the group since this is quite different from creating just a regular, for-leisure group on Facebook. Let me show you how I set it up…
Group Type: When you create the group, you want to make sure that it is a Social Learning type so that you can add all the units and lessons there.
Description: Make your description informative, but brief. This is where you include the link to the landing page. It is important for people to sign up through the landing page for tracking purposes and making sure you get their email addresses.
Apps: I did not conduct my live videos via Facebook since I used StreamYard. I connected the app to my Facebook group.
Hide Group: This is important as well. You need to make the group visible to anyone so that people can search for the group.
Sections: Since this is a Social Learning group, you have special elements that you can choose to add or remove. I find the Social Learning Units section especially useful because it makes the lessons more organized and easier to access.
Membership Approval and Requests: Although you need to make the group visible to anyone, when it comes to approval, it must only be you or your team who can control who gets to join. Include Questions as well when someone requests to join the group to help filter out who are eligible or not.
Here are the questions I asked:
Pinning Posts: Another great practice that you can also apply is to Pin all posts in the group for that respective day. That way, they appear at the top of the group in the Announcement section. When that day is over, don’t forget to remove the announcement to make way for the next day.
Units: The nifty thing about this type of group is that these announcements then turn into units. Members can easily go back to all the other lessons through the Units section of the group.
Events: When you have scheduled livestreams, a wonderful way to announce it to the members is by turning these livestreams into events. That way, the members get notified and will not miss anything.
Launch the Challenge!
You may not be earning anything directly from the challenge but treat it like it is a paid product that you want to promote!
Really put your effort into it like any other big event. Do not be shy to share your challenge with all your friends and connections. In fact, make it a big deal and emphasize who it is for, what is in it for them, and what is the promise you are going to deliver.
Be relentless with this even if it is organic
My promotions consisted of 12 posts every day on my personal Facebook page. This was one post each day, for the 12 days leading up to the challenge.
Here are some of my sample posts:
It also helped that I reached out to some of my friends who could promote the challenge for me.
You are helping other people through this challenge, so be proud!
And once you have participants, be appreciative of them for joining your challenge.
Engage with the Participants
Posting every day in the group during the 5-days is a nonnegotiable. It should be done.
But how often should you post in a day and what should you be posting about?
Before continuing, I want you to know that sending email announcements should also be part of your communication to the participants just to make sure they do not miss anything.
For emails, here are what I sent each day:
- Email 1: Announcement at the start of the day on what they should expect for that day
- Email 2: After the Q&A thread is posted on the Facebook group, an email is sent to them to remind them to post their questions in that thread
- Email 3: 15 minutes before my live Q&A session, this email is sent to the as a reminder to join in on the video
Also, when delivering the training, I prerecord my videos so that I do not have to worry about being perfect. I can always do minor edits. People will be re-watching these educational videos, so make sure you deliver valuable content.
Alongside these prerecorded videos, I highly recommend going live at least once a day to answer their questions and show to them that you are fully present in the challenge. This is the one time that you can give the participants a truly interactive experience.
How to Increase Excitement and Participation?
You are the hype man in the challenge so make sure you are in the best place and have the energy. Your vibe creates the vibe of the challenge!
So mentally and emotionally prepare yourself because hosting a 5-day challenge is not for the faint of heart. But amidst all the hustle, do not forget to take breaks when you need to, and clear your schedule so that you can dedicate all your time and energy into the challenge.
The same principle applies to your participants. Set expectations and encourage everyone to contribute and be energetic as well but give them time to breath and take everything in as well.
Some simple steps you can take is to encourage them to mark DONE in the group once they have completed a task. This encourages accountability and motivates them to share to the group their achievements.
How I set the guidelines for this particular step is that whenever I announce the task for the day, I include instructions like this at the bottom of each post:
You can even offer prices for the most engaged and let the group know that those who do not participate will be removed from the group.
Also, thank everyone for being participative and make them feel important by answering their questions one by one during your live sessions. You want them to know that they are being heard.
If you do this, they will become your biggest supporters and will appreciate all your effort.
Lastly, remember that you cannot have EVERYONE fully take part. Some will give the bare minimum and that is okay.
Focus on the percentage that is putting an effort into the challenge and do not waste your energy on those who are not really giving their all.
HOW TO CLOSE THE CHALLENGE AND MAKE THE FINAL OFFER
The engagement does not end after the 5th day of the challenge. In fact, if you were able to create a wonderful experience for the participants, this is where you get them to say “yes” to what you have been trying to sell all along.
End the challenge with a bang and be grateful for everyone’s efforts.
You need to let them be aware that that there is still so much to learn and that whatever product or service you will be offering after is exactly what they need to move forward.
Do not try to sound to sales-y or force them into buying from you. You still want to keep the same persona of being their helping hand and not some businessperson trying to make a sale.
After the challenge, continue your relationship with them and answer any of their other concerns (as long as you do not give away too much) to build more rapport and add more value.
You can also offer discounts for people who act fast right after the challenge has been completed to give a sense of urgency.
And if you encounter some people who are hesitant to buy your program, always find out why and adjust your offer from there.
As the challenge comes to an end and it is time to announce your program or product, make sure to outline what it is they are going to get out of it. Be specific and connect it back to your challenge.
SOME TOOLS I USED DURING THE CHALLENGE:
Here are some of the tools that I used throughout the challenge to help get my processes in place and track everything:
1) ClickFunnels – to create simple, effective landing pages
2) ActiveCampaign – to send and manage emails on mass to anybody who opts in
3) Facebook Group – the group helped create an environment where you get everyone’s attention and makes you the sole focus of the group
4) ThriveCart – shopping cart to collect payments create nice looking checkout pages that people can pay to
5) Streamyard – for the livestream and pre-recorded tutorial videos
THE RESULTS OF MY 5-DAY CHALLENGE
The whole point of this challenge for me was to sell my service of running other peoples’ ads.
But as I went through the challenge, I realized that the people taking part would not be able to afford this service.
So, I decided to pivot halfway through and sell a group coaching program called Facebook ads Playbook for Local/Small Business instead. This was a much cheaper service and aimed at coaching people how to run effective Facebook ads for their business for 6 weeks.
I was able to close 5 sales, and not only that, but I came up this unique program that helped me cater to a new market.
From my goal of 250 signups for the challenge, we were able to gather 210 during the actual implementation (which isn’t so bad if I say so myself). These signups mostly came from organic posts rather than the paid ads. The organic posts consisted of posts on my Facebook wall, reaching out to my existing network and asking them to help promote the challenge on my behalf.
The reason my paid ads did not work as much was because not much testing and targeting was done. I focused more on a shotgun rather than a sniper approach.
But let us get into more of that later…
In the end, I realized that this challenge was not just about the numbers and making money. During the entire process, I have experienced both expected and unexpected results that have helped me build my brand.
Simply by the virtue of me running the challenge, I made people aware of what I do and what my business is about.
And a funny thing is that the opportunities did not just manifest after the challenge, but even before the challenge happened, people already started reaching out to me!
This included appearing as a guest on a “livecast” (a livestream that gets repurposed into a podcast) in the Firebuilders Show with Joshua Koerpel.
You can access the episode here.
I was also invited to give a talk in a Facebook group because the challenge allowed me to position myself as an expert on the subject matter. I absolutely love teaching and imparting my knowledge, and so I was delighted by this opportunity.
Also, back when I was still doing the organic posts leading up to the challenge, I was already getting inquiries which resulted in 1 paid consulting call, 2 service inquiries (and another 2 more after the challenge), and a Facebook ads audit for a small business.
So there really is more to the challenge than meets the eye. Let’s talk about a few more of these takeaways from the challenge…
TEGA’S TOP 10 TAKEAWAYS
I am in no means an expert in conducting a 5-day challenge. I too have made mistakes and faced my own demons during the process and by sharing this journey, I hope that you can learn a thing or two:
Lesson #1: Don’t let your introversion or insecurities hold you back
For those of you who don’t know me, you should know that I do not really like talking about myself. This was why I felt so nervous during the challenge and even held back a bit when I was promoting.
I feel like I was just doing the bare minimum when I should have put more of my energy out there.
The promo period for the challenge was meant to be 2 weeks but I ended up just doing 1 week because of not being comfortable talking about myself for such a long period of time.
When doing a challenge, I learned it is inevitable that you let yourself out there in the open. You are sharing your knowledge and skills, and you will not confidently be able to do so if doubts and insecurities hold you back.
Lesson #2: Create a proper plan for promotions to maximize participation
I realized that I should have made more of an effort to add bonuses and prizes to the challenge because doing that would have made people more eager to participate in the group.
There was no strategy to promote any incentives to encourage people to fully take part and so the participation was not as high as I would have liked.
Lesson #3: Be prepared to receive a lot of friend requests and messages on Facebook
Because I built a bunch of goodwill over the years and was not expecting much in return, I was not used to the number of messages and inquiries I got on Facebook because of the challenge.
My inbox was full of messages from people congratulating me for the challenge or inquiring about my services. This was not something I was prepared for!
The lesson here is that when you do good, people want to see you win.
Lesson #4: Conduct more testing for the paid ads
In my opinion, the paid ads seemed to be a little bit rushed because I left it to last minute. I did not have the time to do enough testing or running the campaign in the way I would have liked.
In the end, the campaign was just one image with 3 different bits of ad copy variation, and we ran it through a broad audience, meaning the niche was not determined.
If this feels like too much of a burden for you, you can always hire a virtual team member to help you with the marketing and managing of your ads. I wrote an entire article on hiring the right virtual members for your team here.
This was all because I was too focused on implementation, which we will talk about some more in the next few points…
Lesson #5: Design a proper marketing plan
Just like the paid ads, all my social posts were played by ear without a certain strategy in place. This meant that I did not really put a great amount of thought into my organic marketing.
When planning the organic posts, I simply went through the Workflowy document I created and thought about what content to write on social media that would tie up with the challenge.
There was not much creative and strategic thought put into the posts. Just simple copy and photos for the sake of making posts about the challenge.
This whole act ties back to lesson #1 of being timid. Because I was a little bit hesitant posting about myself and what I do, I did not give myself enough room to thoroughly think how I could generate interest for the challenge.
Lesson #6: Do not jump the gun and send links out if the funnels/pages aren’t fully ready
Because I was just so overwhelmed with all the things I had to do, I ended up just posting the links before they were ready. The voice in my head just kept telling me to give it a go, and so I ended up acting on impulse and overlooked proper setting up of the links because I had so many other things on my mind.
Thankfully, this did not really impact the challenge negatively, but nonetheless, this is still a reflection for me and something I need to work on.
Take it one step at a time and really think about the steps you want to take without stressing too much about it.
Lesson #7: Understand that pivots are necessary sometimes
As I said earlier, my initial plan was to sell a DFY (done for you) service. But as I went through the challenge, I realized that there was an issue with the funnel here.
What I mean by this is that from getting someone to do something for free, it would not seem wise to immediately sell a package that costs around £1000 as the next step!
Observing the profile of the participants, it dawned on me that these people do not even fit the market anyway for a DFY service, but rather a DIY service instead. They were programmed in the challenge to do everything themselves — from setting up the ads to managing them – that it just would not make sense to sell them a DFY service afterwards.
Therefore, I decided to pivot and offer a program to complement their DIY mindset, which was also much more affordable as a result.
Lesson #8: Do not overlook the technical bits
On the first day, the session was posted 8 minutes late because I did not factor in the time Facebook needed to render the video. This lesson is more of me being a perfectionist, because the members did not seem to mind the delay.
Since this was my first time running the challenge, I really had no idea that this would happen.
I included this lesson here to let you know what to expect when you run your 5-day challenge and that when you post any videos organically, you will need to upload these in advance to avoid any delays.
Lesson #9: By making the challenge FREE, I ended up getting participants, not at the right stage for my service
I just wanted to let you know that making the challenge free is not really a problem, but this ties back to lesson #2. Because the challenge was free, I needed to find other ways to motivate the participants to contribute.
And since I lacked the incentives to encourage everyone to participate, the fact that the challenge was free and maybe even the way I communicated (lesson #1), all contributed to the reason why there was not as much engagement as I would have liked.
This really all boils down to a lack of planning rather than implementation, which connects to the last lesson.
Lesson #10: I was too focused on implementation that I overlooked the other aspects of the challenge
I was so fixated on the initial plan of the challenge and the process I had in place, that I was not really open to any new ideas to make the challenge even better.
This connects back to lesson #7 wherein I was already married to the idea of offering a DFY service that this affected the planning stage of my challenge when I decided to offer the DIY program instead.
I learned that I should be more flexible and open to change so that I can easily adapt during both the planning and implementation stages of the challenge.
This was my first time running the challenge and so it is only natural to encounter all these minor issues and learnings.
So just like me, do not beat yourself up too much when running your first 5-day challenge!
WILL I BE HOSTING ANOTHER 5-DAY CHALLENGE?
Definitely!
If you have made it to this point in the article, congratulations!
I hope you now have a deeper understanding of what I meant when I said the challenge can be a foundation which you build and grow your business from.
In its purest form, the challenge is a unique lead gen exercise because you need to do a lot of things for your leads before you make an offer to them. It helps you hone your craft and build a stronger client base.
When done correctly, the challenge can be a tool that grows your name, your background and people’s affinity to your brand.
Since I am happy with the results of this challenge, it would be a little bit silly to not seriously consider running another one.
As I said earlier, a 5-day challenge will have a compounding effect. This means that the work will only be quite heavy on the first few challenges and the financial returns may not be as much in the beginning. It only gets better and better, and you grow stronger and stronger.
The longer you conduct these challenges, you continue to build a whole bunch of goodwill that you can leverage on to move your business forward.
This was my first time conducting a 5-day challenge and I am already looking forward to the next one.
As always, I hope that this article will help you in one way or another to decide on how you want to incorporate this challenge into your business.
If you found this article helpful or have any questions you want to ask me, feel free to comment down below.