My Real Results From Participating in Bundles

Bundles are a visibility strategy that let you

lean back without losing momentum. They help you build

your list, make new connections and stay top of mind with

aligned audiences all while you are sipping a nice coffee in

your flip flops.

This is the entrepreneur school podcast where we believe you can

run a thriving business and still make your family a

priority. This show is all about supporting you, the emerging or

early stage Entrepreneur on your journey from solopreneur to CEO

while wearing all of the other hats in your life. My name is

Kelly Sinclair, and I'm a brand and marketing strategist who

started a business with two kids under three. I'm a corporate PR

girl turned entrepreneur after I learned the hard way that life

is too short to waste doing things that burn you out on this

show, you'll hear inspiring stories from other business

owners on their journey and learn strategies to help you

grow a profitable business while making it all fit into the life

that you want. Welcome to entrepreneur School.

Welcome back to another one of our summer strategy snack series

episodes where we are keeping things light and practical and

totally doable in limited time when you are feeling low energy.

So before we dive in, I want to make sure that you have grabbed

the 90 day visibility sprint starter kit. This resource is

going to really help you with focusing on visibility. It

doesn't rely on social media, and that you can do in under 10

minutes a day this summer, I am stepping away completely from

social media, no posting, no scrolling, no pressure. But that

doesn't mean that I'm disappearing. I am still growing

my business and staying visible in ways that feel aligned and

sustainable, and one of the strategies that make that

possible is bundles. And we had Dallas Travers on the podcast

last week talking all about hosting bundles. But I thought,

especially because this episode is coming out while I am on

vacation at the lake and participating in bundles, I

would share a little bit of a behind the scenes of what

happens when you use this visibility strategy and then,

like, literally go on vacation.

So I want to do a bit of a case study from a past bundle explain

why I keep saying yes to these and what makes them work so

well, especially in the seasons like summer, where you want

something that's a little more passive. Okay, let's dive in. So

the first part I want to talk about is why I say yes to

bundles. And I want to acknowledge that not all bundles

are created equal. I have been in some that have not produced a

whole lot of results, but the ones that work well are the ones

that have aligned audiences.

First and foremost, this is what you want to look for. If you're

considering being part of a bundle, you want to know that

it's going to help you reach the right people. This is a tactic,

a visibility strategy, that is designed to help you reach

directly to your target, ideal client. So make sure you

consider that when you're evaluating whether the

opportunity makes sense. The other thing I love to look at is

a host that you want to collaborate with more so

somebody, if you want to be part of their bundle, as a starting

point, but maybe that's an opportunity for you to build

more of a relationship with that person, to be a part of a

podcast, to create some other kind of collaborative experience

together. That's one kind of entry point into building a

relationship. So that's another big consideration for me. Case

in point, Dallas being on my podcast, because I am in her

bundle that she was just hosting as well. And we've been able to

do, like a kind of a stacked collaboration strategy over the

past couple of weeks, where we're sharing each other

regularly. So there's a lot of crossover, and I think that that

always helps with helping you stand out.

Another thing that I look at when bundle hosts send out their

requests to contribute, or you come across the application to

contribute to a bundle. Flexible promotion requirements is a big

one. So I've been in bundles that have requested, you know,

multiple emails over the course of a period of time. Maybe I've

been in three month long bundles, one month long bundles,

one week. Week long bundles and every kind of combination of

timeline from there, but the ones that have flexible

promotion requirements, I find it's just so much easier to

participate in and like when you get to the point of doing stuff

like this more regularly, you probably also have a little more

of a rebooked collaboration and promotion schedule, so you want

to make sure that you have that flexibility with the host.

That's not like you have to send out this email on this one day,

because for me, sometimes that just doesn't work.

So bundles are great for strategic visibility and

automation and passive lead generation with fairly

minimalist because the host often well should put together

graphics swipe copy, which is essentially email templates that

make it super easy for you to share about the event. And I

find them especially useful in summer or slower seasons. I I

look to schedule one to two bundles a month. I've taken some

time off and gone back on, but I like to do a couple of

collaborations per month. And so sometimes that can be two

bundles, a bundle and a summit, a bundle on a podcast, any kind

of combination of that. So I want to share a little case

study from a past bundle, and I can't share the one of the

current one that I'm in, because I obviously don't have the stats

in two bundles over the course of four weeks. The first one was

called pot of gold, which is hosted by my friend Linda Sidhu

and I also was part of my friend Allison Hardy's AI bundle. So

they were two different bundles, but I put the same product into

both of them, because pot of gold was literally just for

anything related to business. So this was a bigger one more

general in topic, versus Allison's, which was aI

specific. So it had to have, it had to be an AI tool. So what I

did offer was my AI tool called Penny, the podcast promoter. She

is a custom GPT that I built that takes your podcast script

transcript and turns it into a script for a 62nd video clip

that you can create to promote your show, almost like a little

show trailer. And it also writes you a social media caption to go

with that. So because I was finding for me, and just a

little side note on what that actual offer is, is that, you

know, I would spend all this time or money having somebody go

through my podcast and get a video clip out of it, and then

put that on social media as part of the promotion, and that was

taking a lot of time and resources. And I thought,

instead, I'll just make a 62nd video, but I wanted to be able

to do that based on what I was talking about in the episode.

And so really easy to grab a transcript and then have aI read

that transcript and turn it into basically a reel based on best

practices and quote viral video strategy. So that's what Penny

does.

So I want to share the results. I think both of these bundles

were open for a month, so let me just break that down quickly. A

host will say that the event is taking place for like, say, one

week, one week or two weeks, and that is the period of time that

people can subscribe to the bundle. But then on the back end

of that, the bundle subscribers have an additional couple of

weeks, so a total of, say, a month to actually go shopping

for their free digital products that they now have access to

because they subscribe to the bundle. So say for me, as a

bundle contributor, I will see email subscribers joining

through that bundle for about one month. So it's not all in

one day or anything. There's definitely like spikes and stuff

that happen. But so in a month for each of these bundles, I had

added 159 and 157 subscribers. So a total of 306 three or

something like, what? But it's math right now. Anyways. Oh,

wait, no, that's not the right number. It's close, though.

That's how many I still have left after multiple months since

they subscribed. So I'm going to get to that in a second. So for

the pot of gold, they act. Actually added 185 people, which

was a 67% conversion rate on my landing page. And for Allison's

AI bundle, I added 162 people, and that was a 63% conversion

rate. And it's the retention rate that I actually care about

the most, which means that I still have 91% of those people

on my list after two months. So they've stayed. They have

received multiple emails from me, and they they think it's

valuable enough to still be there, which is great. That

shows really strong alignment with the audience.

So I want to talk about what makes a bundle successful? What

some of these ones in particular, why they worked.

Number one is host communication. So essentially,

the host is creating an online event, and they have a lot of

moving parts to organize and go back and listen to Dallas's

interview, if you want to kind of get the nitty gritty on what

those are. But as a contributor, I look for organization, good

communication, promotional materials being available in

advance so that I can actually schedule things and automate

them, so I don't have to be like active during the time that it's

happening. Promotional support is that they actually provide

these materials, social media, graphics, or variety of

different kind of graphics you can use in emails, as well as

that swipe copy, that template that you can just take and

customize to yourself.

And then another one that's really important is to look at

the other contributors, and see the alignment there are the

other people who are participating. And again, this

is something you can only evaluate afterwards, because you

don't necessarily know who's in it until you're in it is to look

at look at those people, and see what kind of alignment there is

there that also provides an opportunity for you to reach out

and connect to other contributors about other

collaboration opportunities, which I'm all about, taking one

thing and turning it into multiple things. So if you're in

a bundle, definitely reach out to other bundle contributors,

maybe like me. Now that I've talked to Dallas, I want to host

a bundle, and I'm going to look at those other contributions to

see what opportunities there are for maybe inviting some of those

people to be part of my event in the future. And again, this may

be somebody else you might want to collaborate with. So you want

to get their free gift, be on their email list and reply to

their emails and build relationships with them, as was

noted in one of the episodes I did earlier in this strategy

stack series about reaching out and replying to email

newsletters.

So I just want to break down a little bit of what kind of

setup, tech setup, etc, that you might need as a bundle

contributor. So you need a free gift, some kind of digital

product, checklist, tool thing, which generally is a good idea

to have, because you need to build an email list. We've

talked about this in a variety of episodes before. Building an

email list is one of the best ways to build relationships with

potential clients. And so you need to have this, prioritize

this as part of your foundations. When I work with my

clients, this is the foundations of visibility. We want to make

sure you have something to actually give people, because if

you're just going out and, quote, getting visible, but

there's no way to turn that into an ongoing relationship via

email. So this is like the digital version of giving out

your business card, except there's a president attached to

it, so somebody might actually want to keep it instead of

putting it in a pile on their desk. Right? So what happens

then, after you provide the digital product, is that

somebody will subscribe to it, and then you will send them

what's called a welcome series, right? So a series of

communications and emails to, if you think about it, just like

guide them through who you are, what they're there for, how they

can use this tool. There's a lot of different ways that you can

create a welcome series, but this is about something that you

want to automate and program into your email marketing

system. Some of the key content should be delivering the actual

resource. I like to also send a reminder about using it, and

maybe an example of how to use it, or pointing out a specific

feature or tool that's involved in that resource. I also have

been lately in more of a market research mode. I don't have like

I'm changing some of my offers, right? I'm moving. Into this AI

and marketing and visibility space. So I don't have, like, a

lot of people would have, like, a very specific, this is the

journey I want them to go on my audience, so that I can invite

them to a specific product. For me, that's not what I'm doing at

the moment, I'm actually asking my new people to fill out a very

short survey so that I can get to know them better, so I get

that context of who's joining my list, what kind of things

they're struggling with, what kind of things they want, and

then I send a couple of emails that actually invite them onto a

call to talk about their visibility. So that is

converting a little bit. I'm having a few calls with people

who've come onto my list from that to just talk to them about

what what they're up to, and how I could potentially help. So

that's essentially a discovery call, where I will have the

opportunity to offer some kind of a product or service or

program, and that's how I can make sales.

And then ultimately, then after that point, I just turn them

over to my regular email list, which, if you are on my email

list, what you get from me is a weekly recap of my podcast. So I

don't just send you a link to the podcast, but actually the

highlights of the key messages and the key learnings from that

episode. I will probably also send a weekly collaboration of

some kind. And for the summer, I'm also doing my summer off

social email diaries where I'm talking about all of the things

related to not being on social media for the entire summer. So

that's kind of the like tech setup behind the scenes, but

once you do it one time, you can rinse and repeat this. So it

might be a little bit more of a lift the first time that you do

a bundle, but the payoff can be huge in terms of actually

getting people on your email list, which I think my first

probably four years of business, I had a freebie because I knew

that was what you were supposed to do, but it was just like on

my website. And so if people didn't go to my website, they

didn't get it. How was it getting people to my website?

Like, not like, unless I went to an event and, like, told them

about it, I met somebody, and they went to my website, right?

It was a very slow churn. This is a much, much faster way. And

get, you know, one to 200 subscribers every time I

participate in a bundle. So it's less when you're a bundle

contributor, because you're not getting all of the email lists

you're just or all of the email subscribers that join the

bundle, just the ones that want your thing. But that's also a

good thing, because the ones that want your thing should be

aligned with you and your business, right? So not every

bundle is worth it, but what makes it a yes for me is strong

host and clear audience alignment. So those are the two

core evaluations that I do. I also want to look at like

contributor overlap. So for me, if it's just a marketing bundle,

that's actually harder for me to stand out as a marketing person

than if it's a bundle about something else, and I get to

speak to the marketing element of it, and I'm one of fewer

people who are doing that. This is all about having a focus

theme that matches your offer, and that's the filter to put it

through. So the great thing about bundles is that you can

prep early and plan it out, because as a bundle organizer,

it takes a while, so people often are doing this, you know,

a couple of months in advance. So I have already got bundles on

my calendar two months from now, events on my calendar, like

collaboration, things that I'm doing up to six months from now,

which is great, because then I know that I have that list

building effort happening in the future.

So here's the key takeaway for you today for this strategy

snack, is that bundles are a visibility strategy that let you

lean back without losing momentum. They help you build

your list, make new connections and stay top of mind with

aligned audiences all while you are sipping a nice coffee in

your flip flops, yes, literally, at the beach or on a boat or on

a paddle board or these are all the things I'm doing this week

While this episode is released, if I'm receiving bundle bundle

subscribers to my email list. So if you've ever wanted to grow

your audience without adding more to be your plate, I highly

recommend exploring bundles as part of your long term

visibility plan. And if you're wondering what kind of freebies

work best for something like this, you can grab my. I

resource the 90 day visibility sprint starter kit. It is the

kind of lead magnet that I use in bundles, and it'll help you

to get visible in ways that are strategic and sustainable. So to

grab that, just head to the link in the show notes and make sure

to come back next week for another strategy snack. I'm

going to be talking to you all about booking coffee chats and

how to actually make those lead somewhere and not waste your

time. Don't miss it. Talk to you next week.