160: How To Turn Free Bundles Into Big Bucks

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Welcome to the Creators MBA Podcast, your go to resource for mastering the art and science of digital product entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners craft robust growth strategies that combine the magical world of digital products and selling them via automated funnels and savvy e commerce practices. Join me as I unravel the secrets to boosting digital product revenue and designing long term business growth. From exclusive interviews with industry leaders to in depth analysis of successful digital product models, this podcast is your guide to thriving in the digital product marketplace. So sit back, relax and enjoy the show.

And my special guest today is Kate Doster. Kate is the host of the do the Brave Thing online Business podcast. It's her soul and soul's mission to put money in the hands of good people so that they can do good with it while eradicating the idea that nice people always finish last in business by sharing spammer face free sales techniques that even your grandma would be proud of you using. Kate, I am super excited to chat with you today and we're going to be talking about propelling your profits and leads with bundles, which is one of my favorite topics and you are the expert here. But before we get into all the good questions that I have for you, can you tell the audience just a little bit more about you and how you help people?

Sure. So I am so excited to be here. Destiny is just fantastic. But you guys all know this from listening to the podcast. So thank you so much for having me on here. So hey everyone. Like we had said, I have my own podcast called do the Brave Thing online business podcast and my website is Kate Dawson.com and I started off my online journey actually as a stay at home mom. Like most of us. Like you need income, right? So you start a blog and realize that takes forever and ad revenue can only get you so far. So I found out that copywriting with a W, not with a C was a thing. And that was basically the ability to write words that make people take action. So it's writing sales copy and sales messages and once I found out that that was a thing, I was off to the races. Because I'm like, I love people, I love psychology, I love talking. And that is stuff that COG Rania is all about. We are off to the races. And then I decided like most service providers, hey, I think I'm going to do a course business because I don't feel like having like a million other bosses, right? And my wait list was long. So I always felt bad that people had to wait and it was a big, long thing. Well, something that you kind of forget when you are a service provider who's then transitioning into a one to many model is you need a lot more people to talk to than you would have needed to before. So, like, I can write a sales page and I can write sales emails that convert way above industry standards. That was not the problem. But the problem was eyeballs to be able to replace my income as a copywriter. And so I hosted my first free bundle in 2019. It was the Back to business bundle. We're hosting again this year. And in like a matter of days, myself and the people that I did it with, I think destiny, you might have been one of our first ones too. Like, everyone was getting like a thousand eight hundred and like there was only like fifteen of us. Like not even. It was not a big bundle at all. And all of us just got such great results. And what's really great about bundles is that they can be very repeatable. You can add bells and whistles, you can keep it really simple and they're just so darn effective. So like, finally, like, I can sell, but I needed people to sell to and SEO was taking forever and social media just hated me because I was never consistent. But running a bundle that I could do.

Well, I definitely want to dive into all the details with you on this before we go. I just want to let you, you know, and you may or may not know this, I hosted one of my first free bundles personally in my personal brand this past year. And it was a huge hit at it. It did so well, quite frankly, Kate, that we are going to be doing three of them this year. And I used your collaboration cash course to do that and it was so very helpful. But before we get into some of these details, for everybody who's listening, who may not be familiar with what we're talking about, can you let them know exactly what we mean about a bundle?

Sure. So, and I hate using this term because y' all know from hanging out with other marketers, everything is life changing. But like, bundles are truly business changing for everyone. For you, for your contributors, which will identify what those are and who they are, and for the people that register and get to get access to the stuff either for free or an extremely low cost. Like, they just, they can change so many people's lives. So this is why I love this so much and why I get so excited, right? Because you can see that really big momentum and that really big growth. So a bundle, whether you decide to do a Free one, a paid one. There's a mystery third one called a hybrid bundle, which we may or not get into, but I always say either start with a free bundle, so you see if you like the concept and then go from there. So with a free bundle, technically a paid one too, you are going to get together with a couple of other people who also serve your audience, but in a different way. So in a free bundle, I think that you can have an extremely successful free Bundle with like 20 contributors. I think that's really, really great. You make sure that every contributor is covering a different topic. We call it like pillars, so that way no one has to fight for eyeballs. So say if your target audience is a stay at home mom, right. And you want to be the person that's going to help them with gentle parenting, right. You're not going to let somebody else put in an item that's gentle parenting, right? You're going to find somebody that handles budgeting, you're going to find somebody that handles cooking, and you're going to let them be the only person that's got a cooking item in this bundle. And what makes this so great is unlike the algorithms and ads, you actually have a whole group of people that are all going to be promoting you and your bundle at the same time. And because a bundle is only available for a limited time, I always tell my students no more than seven days. So some people will do it to Wednesday to a Wednesday. We've been testing it out and we usually do a Monday to a Friday. It has that built in urgency where it's like, hey, all for the next week, you can get access to 20 top notch courses, resources, templates, whatever they are, that normally would sell for over $2,000 completely for free. You go ahead, you pick and choose which ones you want and you are off to the races. And people just love them. And especially if you're teaming up with other creators that say are your size or even just slightly bigger because you can reach for the stars if you want to, they're going to see such fast list growth with a free bundle. They're going to love you forever, right? As the person that's hosting and putting this on. Like, it's like, wait a minute. And we never, and we never have our students guarantee results. But say even if everyone gets, you know, 500 people or 300 people to their list, they're getting an extra 300 people. It costs them like $0 because all stuff they already had, you already made the promotional materials for them. It's like a complete no brainer. And now they have all these new people to help. And especially with free bundles, some people are concerned that it's only going to attract like freebie seekers or people who aren't serious of buying. What I found with a free bundle is the people that register. Sure some people are going to like fall off. It happens naturally. But most of them are just so unbelievably grateful and excited that they got your product or part of your product for free. They're going to use it, they're going to talk about it and they're going to want to see what else you have else to buy. So it really is a complete win win for everyone. So that is how a bundle works. It's limited time. You team up with again we'll say like 20 people, 19 other people, where everyone puts in stuff that you know is valuable. Not your typical freebie, not a webinar or checklist. We want high quality items. People can get them for free for that week. And then if it's a paid bundle, the only true difference is I would get more contributors because you're going to put a price tag on it. So people in that case, like while they would buy something would say like 20 if you want to charge a hundred dollars, a little bit harder of a sell. But if you've got like 40 items or 50 items, like technically they're only spending like $2 a course, like that's fantastic, right? So that's really the only difference is just how many contributors you have.

And I like the tip that you gave on having those kind of those pillars so people aren't competing for those eyeballs. So let me ask you this, when would somebody choose to do a free bundle versus a paid bundle? And I definitely want to go into what you mentioned earlier, which is the hybrid, and talk about that too. But let us kind of walk us through. If we're thinking about doing a bundle, what is our thought process or what would be some of the determining factors to kind of direct us one way or the other.

I love this question so much and they really are beneficial. And again, what I love about this strategy is you can always build on it, right? So if you are a little bit newer to your business, while there can be that allure of like, oh, if it's a paid bundle then I can get a cash injection. Like, you know, if you have a nice amount of contributors, you know, you can probably have your first five figure launch, which is exciting. Like everyone's like, oh man. But if you're really just starting out and you have never really done like a big group collaborative event, right? Like, you've never run a summit before either. Like, if you've run a summit before, then I would say you could go into paid bundles. But where bundles kind of trips people up is. It's a lot of wrangling cats, if you will. So if you're not used to, like, people management, inbox management, and we talk about how to do this in collaboration, cash in, then I would say stick with free bundles. Especially, especially if your email list is small because, like, I don't know why this seems to be the number, but we have a lot of students that come to us with the course and they've got like 400, 500, they run a free bundle. They're ending the week with 4,000 subscribers that are brand new to them that they've never had. And like, you know that is business changing, right? Because now you have literally 100x the people that you can talk to. You're so excited, you want to talk to them, you've got the momentum going, you got great results for everyone, and you're like, let's go, go, go, go, go. Now say if you're somebody who's a bit more established in their business, like, maybe your email list is over 10,000 already, so getting an extra, say, 2,000, 3,000 subscribers, while it's cool, it might not be as business changing for you, right? So in that case, go ahead and do a free bundle, especially because if you're a little bit more established, then you can have a VA help you out with all that contributor management part, right? So it's not just necessarily you as a solo entour, being like, destiny, like, your link doesn't work. I thought you said it was going to work. What's going on and pitching people, because you can have that. And again, like I said, with a paid bundle, you want to have more people. So a lot of the times what our students will do, because their list tends to be small and they've got, you know, products and stuff they want to sell, they'll do their free bundle, they'll learn how it works, the ins and outs, they'll set themselves up. And then the next time around, if they want to, they can do a paid bundle and see if they like that version better and then go back to it. And your audience is never going to be like, oh, my last time your thing was free. People are just stoked, right? Like, it gets you out there, you get people really great results and so I think that is kind of one of those advantages. So like, if you're. I know this sounds kind of odd too, but like, if you really want to make friends, then I think I might go with a free bundle. Because while yes, with the paid bundle, people's email list will grow, it's because there's more people. They usually tend to get less signups and they might not make the commission back. But like, if out of nowhere you're getting them like a thousand new subscribers they didn't have before for a free bundle, they will love you forever and you'll always be that go to person that talks about your thing. So that's my. And, and this is probably the last sort of thing. I think with a free bundle, there's less pressure if you find that you have like mindset issues around hitting number goals. Right? Because obviously, yes, during a free bundle, you want to make sure it's getting a lot of traffic. You want to make sure people are getting a lot of clicks. But it's not like if you're running a paid bundle and you're like, oh my goodness, we haven't sold 100 yet. We haven't sold 100 yet. Everyone's disappointed, I'm disappointed, blah, blah, blah. No one disappointed at all with any results from a free bundle. So if you need to, to build that muscle of confidence, that's where free bundle would go. But again, if you are more established business owner, you already have some connections, maybe you have like a VA that helps you out, then go with paid.

So I love all of that. And I will tell you, I. We can talk about your hybrid model too, also. But in the free bundle that we did in 4 4th quarter of 2023, I did a free bundle, but I also had a paid workshop that we were doing on, on the back end of it with a, with the funnel had an order bump and some upsells there too. And all the contributors got affiliate commissions based on, you know, if they're purchasing, you know, their audience purchased that. So maybe that's similar to what the hybrid model you were talking about. Or maybe you had something in different, you know, something else in mind. There's.

Oh, it's a little bit different. So there's a lot of ways. And we can talk about that in the next question if you want to. There's a lot of ways that you can make money with a free bundle. Because I know people like, I'm putting in all this effort and I'm getting no monies. Oh, no, no. No, no, you're gonna get money. It's. Don't you worry. Don't you worry. We've got ways that you can monetize that and ways that aren't gross. So what a hybrid bundle is, it's kind of sort of like yours, but it's a little different. So a hybrid bundle is where you have two different tiers and technically a secret third tier if you want to add it. So basically what you will do is you'll come up with for your contributors, there has to be like a cash value amount that you want their gift to actually retail at or their contribution. Right. If it falls under a threshold, it goes in the free tier level. So again, anyone who registers for the free tier level can get access to anything in the free tier level for like that week or whatever the claim period is. If the person is putting out a product that is above that sort of free threshold, if you will, then that goes in the premium one that you are going to sell. So, for example, we have our back to business bundle coming up. So just so you guys know, any item that somebody contributed, and we told them this before, they contributed an item, any item they contributed that was priced under $50 was in our free tier. So people can grow their email list, they can get some exposure, like, who's not going to register for the free tier? Right. But if they gave us a product that was priced at $50 or above, than it was in our premium tier. So for the premium Tier, it is $97. You get access to everything in the free tier. Again, you guys get to pick and choose. It's not like we just sign up for everyone's email list, but you actually get access to courses that legitly sell for $50 or more. And so in our particular case, I think we had 78. I keep on saying 77, but I believe we ended up with 78 or 79 products in the premium bundle as well. So. So that's sort of a hybrid bundle where basically you give people options. That's probably the last version of a bundle that I would have somebody to do because I'd much rather you be like, very, very focused on your first couple bundles to see, okay, which one did you like better? Which one ultimately helped your business move along? And then, all right, let's combine the two and see what happens.

So what are some other ways you mentioned there was other ways people could monetize? Because it is a lot of work, whether you're, you know, when you're doing all of these collaboration Events because you are kind of wrangling a lot of people together. What are some other ways you can monetize bundles? Free, paid, or even a hybrid? And that third tier that you talked.

About, okay, so the mystery third tier, I should probably finish that one up first. Then we're going to talk about monetizing a free one and monetizing a paid one even more. So the mystery third tier is what I call and in the back business bundle, you guys will see it. And we call it the bundle booster tier. So what that is is a very low cost. It's an order bump, essentially a very cheap upgrade. Ours is $7. Some of our students do nine. Where basically people will get extra time to claim things in the free tier. You can put in maybe a live Q and A call. So it's not as. It's not the same stuff that's in the premium tier, but it's just a little bit extra. Right? And then if somebody decides to do that bundle booster tier, maybe you'll give them, you know, like a tracker of their items. Maybe you'll do, like coworking sessions. Again, it's only something you're selling for seven or nine dollars, but people will see how great it is. And then it's like, hey, I can buy that back from you and you can upgrade to the premium tier if you want all this other stuff. So it's just giving people some other options if they're like, I need a little bit more time. Well, here's a little bit more time. Here's something to keep you more organized. Here's something to make sure you actually go through stuff. And hey, look, if you want to upgrade to get the whole kit and caboodle, you can still do that, too. So that's like that mystery third tier where you don't have to have that by any stretch of the imagination, but it's something we're testing out to see if we like it and if people like it. So in order to make money with a free bundle, this is where it comes really great. You want to make sure that the item that you're putting in to the bundle makes sense for it to say, have something like, on the thank you page, you can have another offer immediately. I know what you're thinking. Like, Kate, if they can get 20 other things for free on the other page, why are they going to invest $30 in something that I have? Well, whatever you're offering on that thank you page is going to be different. And you're going to kind of tell Them, right? So we'll just use a concrete example in a free bundle. I gave away 30 email newsletter tablets, right? So literally the thank you page after somebody signed up was like, hey, great, we got your newsletter taken care of, but what about your welcome series, your funnels or God forbid your links aren't working. Keep scrolling, right? So it literally will tell them in that top half like you've got your thing, right? But here's the next step. And look, I've got something here and it's special price for you. People like to call it tripwires. I hate that term personally. But you can have tripwire. So that's one way that you can monetize. And if you want to even go kind of like you guys did above and beyond, you can tell your contributors that they can be affiliates for your tripwire stuff, right? Another way that you can make money. And they're technically many sponsorships, but for some reason I feel like the word sponsorship freaks people out. So we call it VIP spots instead. So you can sell VIP spots. So you're not going to charge everyone to be in a bundle. You'll open up maybe like five spots. You can do this for free, you can do this for paid, doesn't matter. And you can say like for a hundred bucks, 200, you set it up that their gift is going to be featured at the top of the page, that it's going to have a special badge that you're going to be talking about and all your marketing stuff. Basically you're just making their gift the most appealing. We've always found, especially with a free bundle, like the top sort of three spots always seem to get the most clicks. So like we'll rotate through our vip so that way they get the most clicks and essentially the most signups. So you can do that for making money. This is one of like the biggest, biggest moneymakers is using your free bundle. And again, make sure that your item makes sense as like a pre, pre launch activity. So say that you know you're going to have a big old launch, you're going to like a webinar launch or a live five day challenge, right? But your audience is not that big. Or maybe you've run this before and you only have like 50 new people on your list, right? This is what you're going to do. You're going to get all of these new leads from the bundle and then in your welcome series, technically on that thank you page, if you want to get them to sign up for your challenge for your webinar for your launch. So that way you can sell on the back end. You can sell in your welcome series as well. If you have an automated webinar, like, while you would never put that in as your gift item, especially in a free bundle, but even in a paid, you can in your welcome series get people to your automated funnels. So there's a lot of different ways you can monetize that. We also have for our free bundles and our paid ones too, we have a section of like recommended tools. So again, there's a lot of reciprocity when you're giving people amazing stuff for free or like zero dollars, basically. So I was like, hey, if you really enjoyed, you know, whatever your name your bundle is and you're thinking about. And again, it has to be affiliate links that would make sense for your people and for your topic. Here's this, right? So we're in the online business space, so it would be something like I could put my affiliate link for like, hey, if you enjoyed the Back to Business bundle and you were thinking of getting Thrive cart to be able to do order bumps and have Thrive learn all other stuff. If you use our link, it'd be greatly appreciated. If not, that's okay, right? So we call that like the other resources. It's almost like that, you know, like recommendation toolkits that everyone has on their website. You throw that in there. That can work. Like I said, there's a lot of different ways. You can have official sponsorships too, if you want, but there's a lot of different ways that you can monetize. You don't have to do all of them. You can pick and choose. Some of them you can do a little or a lot of them. That's what's so great about bundles.

I love all of those tips. I love what you said about calling them VIP spots instead of sponsorships because I think people that kind of resonates with them, right? In a bundle landing, free landing page like that.

So I love, love, love are gonna do a launch. Like you get to be the main sponsor, right? Or say that like, maybe you're doing this and you know your launch isn't going to be for like two or three months because I don't know, it's just, it's not gonna work out for you. But you've got a podcast, right? You can have your podcast, be the main sponsor of your bundle, right? So I could have the Back to Business Bundle brought to you by the Judah Bracing Podcast, right? So anytime I've got my logo, guess what it going to have the logo for my podcast. It's going to keep it top of mind so you can grow your other organic revenue channels or just content channels as well so you can be your own sponsor.

So Kate, thank you so much for giving us all these tips about bundles, whether they're free to paid, even the hybrid that you mentioned. Any last minute tips that you want to cover for the audience? And then I want to talk a little bit about the Back to Business bundle that you have coming up.

Sure. I would say the biggest mistakes that people have in running a bundle and we already kind of touched on that one, they think that it's not going to attract high quality people. That's just not true. Are you going to see a slightly higher unsubscribes than you would those first couple of emails? Maybe. But like it's not that much higher. Like it's nominally higher. So you'll be fine. The second thing is thinking I can't do one because I'm not business to business. The only reason why you might be seeing more business to business ones is because those people know who they're targeting. Right. So you're a business owner or a blogger who is monetizing. They're going to target you. That's why those are the ones that you're seeing. But creating a busy mom bundle, there are so many more busy moms. Not everyone wants to be a business owner. Like we're kind of wackadoos in all honesty. No, nobody is truly wants to be us in the long run when you think about it. So definitely do not think that you can't do it. We saw one for dancing. We've had one for a homesteading. That was the theme. Like they do like gangbusters. There's one for Frugal Living Gangbusters. They made money on the back end. Like it worked so well. And the other thing is, and we had already touched on this when setting it up and that is having that variety of gifts. So even if you have like a paid tier or even in your free tier, we try to limit it where especially for like, you know, if it's just a free one, we try to just have one person for one thing but like at most for this one because it's a really, really big one. For the Back to Business bundle, I think it was four. Four people could cover the same topic but it had to be a different angle. So that way again everyone could get eyeballs and, and the right people and people registering just wouldn't be like, why are there five? Learn how to blog courses, right? It's like one of them is like getting traffic, right? One of them is setting up the back end of WordPress, that sort of a thing. Because you want to think of it from both sides. The contributors, yours and the people that register. Because you want your bundle to be the best. So those are like the biggest sort of. The biggest sort of things that I can think of. And again, the very last one, especially for free, thinking it has to be huge. It does not. You could honestly get together with five of your friends and do it in like the next three weeks, just as a little audience boost and see amazing results. Because I don't know about you, but like I'm down for a couple extra hundred people and not having to pay Zuckerberg for them.

Absolutely. And I love the idea of just getting together with five of your friends. That seems so much more easier than wrangling, you know, 40 contributors, quite frankly.

That's why I love this method so much because it's so buildable and repeatable and scalable and you could add more bells and whistles. And again, even if you change like the name slightly because say you did do a free one and I want to do a paid one so people don't get confused. Like, you're still going to use the same assets, right? You're still going to use the same intake form, you're just going to update it slightly, right? You're still going to use these same series so you can just recycle things. And it is fan frickin tastic.

Now we are right in the middle of registering and signing up for the back to business bundle. Now, Kate, do you want to tell us just a little bit more about it and what people can expect?

Oh man, I love this bundle. This is our biggest, baddest bundle that we have ever done. Like I said, we've been doing them since 2019. And so we held out, we pulled out no stops for this one. Absolutely, all of it. So like we talked about, this is one of those hybrid bundles. So we do have the free PA and we have that bundle booster tier which we had talked about. Our free tier has over 120 items. Our premium tier has over 77 items and their retail value is over $14,000 and you can get it for 97 bucks plus you get everything in the free tier. And for the paid tiers we have co working sessions. Because one of the downsides of bundles, as somebody who registers is you can get access to so much stuff it's kind of overwhelming and you kind of don't do stuff. And I really need people to take action. Like that is like the heart of me is to move you to do stuff and to do it consistently. So we have power hour slash action hours where certain creators are going to help you go through their product and answer the questions. We have panel discussions, we have a free pop up Facebook group for all the tiers everybody can go. That is the only spot in that free Facebook group where you can get our back to business bundle bingo card. So like I talked about, I like rewarding action takers. So we have a whole bunch of different actions that you can take. And if you do and you submit the bingo card, we'll have certain threads for certain days. If you do, then you have a chance to win raffle items from our contributors. We are every single day are going to be offering a free upgrade. So say if you were just a free registrant and you want bingo, then you get the bundle booster level. If you already have the bundle booster level, then you get access to the premium tier for the upgrade. If you already had the premium tier, then we give you your money back and then some. Right, because you won bingo. So like we got to give you some cool prizes there. And like I said, the only place they're going to be able to share it and get it and talk about it is going to be inside that free pop up group. And like I said, you get access to that regardless of which tier that you sign up for. But they are so many things. We did make it easy for everyone to be able to look through all of our items. You can search by creator's name so you can just put in Destiny if you just want her stuff. You can search by keywords like Facebook or Instagram. You can search by type if you wanted to, like course template toolkit. You can even search by actual retail price if that's the way you want to claim things on the paid tiers. We also have an item tracker so you can keep track of the stuff that you have and all of your logins and, and all of that. Like I said, we just wanted to make this as business changing for people as possible. Again, as somebody who started off her business as a stay at home mom on welfare, being able to get access to all of these things for free or for $100 was business changing because I would have never been able to afford anything otherwise. That's why I love them so much.

And I love how you have put together all of These other activities like the bingo and the co working sessions. And I know I'm participating in a live panel. Yeah. And the panels. I'm so looking forward to that. Just to help people not only, you know, sign up for the resources that they're interested in, but take that, you know, first step, that action step. So, Kate, before we wrap it up here, can you tell the goody audience where they can find you? And I believe you might have a free gift from for them also. And I, I will definitely include the link to sign up for the bundle also in the show notes.

Yes. So and if you guys are on Apple, I noticed that it's a lot harder to find show notes these days sometimes and links. So you might have to click on where you're listening to us in those triple dots and then go to show and then it'll show the show notes. So definitely make sure that you get those. But if you guys want to hang out further, if you're like, hey, I want to know more about you definitely. After you go ahead and leave a review for this show right here, go on over into your podcast app and search do the Brave Thing or Kate Doster. So that way you can listen to my. I call it weekly ish. My weekly ish podcast that we have going on there where I give you actionable tips that you can have. But I also make sure that your brain does not get in the way. Because the longer I have been on this, it's a lot of people are like, I know I should do this, but like, I can't get myself to do it or how do I find time to actually do these things? So I want to make sure all of that is taken care of. You can also head over. I've been growing my Instagram slowly but surely, and that is Kate Underscore Duster. And if you guys are like, this does seem interesting. And I'm listening to this in the back of this bundle is over, which stinks. You can always head on over to Kate D' Oster.com forward/two years. And that will give you two years worth of email ideas. And I actually mapped it out by month because, you know, just giving you 404 or 104 things to talk about. Brains can't organize that. So I organized it for you. If you're like, kate, it's July, don't worry because it turns out January through June are going to come back around next year. So you're fine. You didn't miss anything. If you're like, I don't like week three's prompt use weeks four it's okay. It's just to give you a starting off point because the size of your email list doesn't matter nearly as much as the relationship you have with them. So you got to talk to them.

So Kate, thank you so much for joining me today. And like I said everybody, we will include those links and make sure that you can sign up for the Back to Business bundle. Thanks so much Kate.

Thank you.

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