How I Gained 515 Email Subscribers with Just One Hour of Work

And secret trick to growing your list — for free!

I remember the very first time I participated in a bundle.

I’d had a steady list growth through writing on Medium for about a month. But my business plan was to gain audience in different places, and bundles were always part of that plan.

Therefore, I had just submitted my first digital bundle product. It was a printable I’d initially made for Etsy and just made into a template.

When I went to sleep on Christmas Eve, I had 3218 subscribers. When I woke up the next morning, I had 68 new subscribers —all from the bundle!

How’s that for a little Christmas magic?

The signups for the bundle lasted the whole Christmas week, and I got a total of 351 subscribers.

And that’s not even my best bundle — in January, I actually got 515 subscribers from participating in a different one! (It was this one, if you’re interested.)

Are you familiar with bundles as a way to grow your email list?

If not, you’re in for a treat — read on, my friend!

How Bundles Work

The idea behind bundles is to combine audiences in order to help all participating contributors grow their list.

Someone (the bundle host) takes the initiative, and calls for contributors. Each contributor submit a product for the bundle — this is a product they would normally have customers pay for, but they contribute it free of charge to the bundle.

Most bundles consists of somewhere between 30 and 100 such products. The contributed products can be anything that is useful for people downloading the bundle — it could be templates, digital courses, swipe copy, challenges etc.

The bundle host decide on a total price for the bundle — normally ranging from 0 (yes, many bundles are free!) to $97. There are bundles in many different niches — a lot are in online business, but there are also bundles in niches like money/savings, parenting, health/fitness, craft/DIY etc.

The bundle price is normally a discount of more than 95 per cent, as the combined value of the products in the bundle is often worth at least a couple of thousand bucks and usually either given away for free or sold for a combined price of less than $100.

New audiences

And then, the magic begins!

Every contributor behind the bundle market the bundle to their own email list. Let’s say, for simplicity, that there are 40 contributors and that they all have a list of 2500 email subscribers.

Normally, when they send emails, they reach those 2000 subscribers and that’s it. However, with the bundle, each of these 40 contributors get the chance to be in front of the audience of the 39 other contributors — meaning an audience of 40x2 500 — in other words, 100 000 potential subscribers.

Of course, not all of these 100 000 people will download the bundle. But bundles, and especially free bundles, are pretty popular, so there is a good chance that many of them will.

And once inside the bundle, the potential subscribers get a list of all the free goodies they can download. They just leave their name and email address for whichever product they want — and they are then automatically added to the email list of whoever contributed that product.

Is it a lot of work?

Absolutely not.

I’ve participated in three bundles over the past six weeks, and have spent less than two hours on each of them.

Now that I’ve gotten the hang of it, it’s less than one hour.

As long as you already have a digital product (which you probably have, if you are building an email list — it can even be an extended version of one of your freebies), you basically need to do three things in order to participate:

1.You need to find the bundle and submit your product early enough (they can be a bit tricky to find, so this is actually what I’ve spent the most time on. I’ve got you covered, though — sign up here, and I will send you submission links to three bundles that are taking participants right now!)

2. You need to make a checkout page or apply a coupon, so that people can download the product for free (I do this by applying a coupon in ThriveCart, so it only takes me about a minute).

3. You need to market the bundle to your own audience with an email when the bundle is live. Oh, and very often, there is an upsell or premium bundle involved —so if someone from your audience buy anything, you’ll get a commission. Normally, the commission is somewhere between 40 and 70 per cent, so it can add up to good money.

Yup, that’s it!

It’s not a trick — it is actually that easy.

So if you are working to grow your email list, and you already have a digital product for sale, bundles could be a fantastic option for you!

A final tip to remember: Don’t contribute your most expensive product — you want to be able to sell something to the people who join your list!

How to find bundles

When you haven’t been in bundles before, they can be a bit tricky to find — once you have already participated, you will most likely be contacted by people who suggest that you also participate in their bundles.

To make it easy for beginners, you can sign up right here to get submission links to three bundles you can consider participating in.

In addition, I’ve put together a newsletter where I will not only send you bite-sized lessons on bundles every week, but also send you direct links to all the bundle opportunities I can find. It’s basically a course, but only easy-peasy bite-sized lessons delivered to your mailbox every week — and the price tag is only $5/month. Get the newsletter here.

Oh, and if you want to learn more about how I used the combination of bundles and Medium articles to grow my list from 3 to 3283 subscribers (and earned a lot of affiliate income in the process), I’ve just made a masterclass with five video modules as well, going through all the steps — and it is on sale right now.

You’re also most welcome to sign up for my free newsletter for lots of tips and tricks for online businesses.